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ITALIAN PORTRAITS 
IN ENGADINE FRAMES 

G. E. X. 


THE PHILOSOPHER PRESS 

VAN VECHTEN & ELLIS 

WAUSAU WISCONSIN 




:P\(07 


THE LIL! ARY OF 
CONGKtbS. 

Two Copies Received 

3 1905 

OopyriKOt Entry 
^e.A.Z7j 

OiAtS ^ XXc. *loi 



COPY A. 


V 


Copyrighted 1904, 

By Lydia Ethel F. Painter 


■# 





Of this edition of 
Italian Portraits in ELngadine Frames 
one hundred copies were privately 
printed for the author at the Philosopher 
Press, and the type distributed, and 
of them this is number 








To 

My dearest Kenyon. 

Before putting pen to paper Racine 
was wont to exclaim, "Ma tragedie 
est fait!"— as much finished to him, 
as after the "march and splendour" of 
his pen’s language had by recording it 
put it within the grasp of other minds. 

In a sense all histories are tragedies, 
as all tragedies are histories; and as life 
in itself is one never-ending tragedy, the 
history of it is of ever new interest. But 
some of these tragedies are so gentle in 
their nature, so elusive in their sentiments 
that if they are to be recorded, it mu^t 
be in language as gentle and simple as 
Racine’s is grand and splendid. 

"So the year’s done with! 

(Love me forever.)" 








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ITALIAN PORTRAITS 

IN 

ENGADINE FRAMES 


I Italy imagination may 
have free range, may 
take from and give to 
the whole landscape a 
perennial charm, may 
rearrange nature’s in- 
tents and methods until 
work is the greater of 
the day’s delights and 
fitted expression of the 
spirit. 

In all lands where 
nature is gentle, bright, winning, vexation 

1 



of spirit does not survive — it is not 
the fitted. 

Italy’s voice is full of call notes and 
song is her language. Blooming flowers 
and fruiting trees, sunlight, starlight, air 
and sapphire sea evoke response the 
true^ from the soul of a man, are the 
inspirators of his mind and the teachers 
of his hand. 

In Italy the Pa^ sleeps and nature 
says, ”Let be: tear not away the tangle 
and the bloom, the vines and moss and 
you will not see the ugly gashes in my 
side, nor ^art afresh the blood’s flow 
from cruel wounds. Men come to me 
to find help to their imaginations, help 
in giving expression to that fine sense of 
the soul they call art, and embodying 
that sense in fit forms. To that end 

1 everywhere spread before them a 
wealth of beauty, everywhere cover the 

2 


unsightly, everywhere make to-day more 
winsome than ye^erday. 

To-day see, ye^erday let be. The 
wa^e places I have covered with fresh 
clean life, to the noisome places my 
sunshine will not penetrate, — why you?” 

In Italy, La Felice is my tent’s 
plateau, where from time to time I go 
with Leo— my unque^ioning, responsive 
Leo — and there I "lengthen the cords 
and ^rengthen the pegs" of my tent and 
entering into possession of this land’s 
splendid inheritance, it’s open-handed 
gifts to nature-lovers, I set up my small 
canvas and unpack my sketching blocks 
and seek to gain the thing for which 
men come to this land of inspiration. 

T o-day then is mine ! Nature makes 
it the thing of beauty that it is; across 
ye^erday, out of it’s light is projedted no 
shadow into to-morrow. The yesterdays 

3 


do not ask of it — the to-morrows make 
no promise to it, one immortal day 
it is! Therefore nature may well make 
boa^ — ”no pail is mine, no future — ” 
but with strength untrammeled gives to 
every day her immortal wonder work. 

From Felice I see none of Italy’s 
scars, none of her mortal wounds. Close 
covered they are hidden deep away. 
Nature keeps her promise. Everywhere 
her world is glorious, everywhere her 
beauty supreme. It lies along the 
mountain’s side, comes down to itop 
on plateaus, to run on with the merry 
rivulets, to take reit in the shade of 
orchards and groves, to go on to the 
very edge of the sparkling sea there to 
be scattered like bright-sheened pearls 
around the shores of Naples’ Bay. 

From Felice I see it all, near sheen 
and far sheen, blue sky and bluer sea, 
4 


making that long chain of familiars— 
Naples, Ischia, Procida, Sorrento, Capri, 
Vesuvius, and all of them presenting 
themselves to Felice with ineffable charm. 

Capri, my near and beautiful 
neighbor, is always in fe§ta. Her 
orange, lemon and olive groves, her 
vineyards and her tangled vines climb 
over and cling to her rugged cliffs until 
she carries them, a heedless suicidal 
throng, sheer over her sides into the 
very arms of the sea. Then too, better 
than any other, Felice watches the 
mysterious sapphire sea enter the blue- 
wonder-cave where in the bosom of 
"The Island Pearl" it gives a full 
revealment of unrivaled beauty. 

Oh marvelous sea, keeping the 
pulse of every lover of thee athrob, it 
is a daring venture to imitate thy 
morning cuid evening mySleries, the glow 

5 


of thy twilight’s gold, the flush of thy 
crimson dawn. The life upon thy 
shores art approaches in semblance 
only, yet approach there must be if man 
quench not the fervor in his soul, but, 
oh save the semblance from being 
trave^ies of thee ! 

Why do we love thee so — thou 
who doA not ask any to be thy lovers — 
thou who \oweSt none ? Men may come 
and go, indifferent to thee as thou to 
them ; may be wholly blind to thy 
beauty, scoff at thee, it is all one to 
thee, thou who haft no returns to make 
them, no favors to ask of them. But, 
here where thou weareft such superb 
and splendid beauty, revealest such 
tender and inspiring moods, a man must 
proftrate himself in adoration, must warm 
his heart with love of thee, must drink 
such inspiration to his soul that love of 
6 


thee takes him in possession, holds him, 
lifts him until thy beauty is with every 
passion blended ! 

As through a telescope I see the 
life on the shores of Felice’s sea, the 
heavens are unfailingly blue above, the 
sea its earthly counterpart, all between 
is my imagination’s playground. 

Higher up among the olives is a 
little mount I name Olivet. The 
monastery that crowns it is old, so old 
that any young life in it seems to be 
prematurely aged. The apartness of 
mona^ery-life bears a relationship to that 
of tent-life and is doubtless the reason of 
the neighborly exchange of courtesies 
that passes between us at Felice with 
the brothers on Olivet. Their curious 
legends and not less curious versions of 
everyday news and gossip make good 
”in the world but not of the world,” and 


7 


gives to Leo and me the happy chance 
of keeping in touch with the world 
without going into its centers. 

Among these brothers is one 
Antonio, younger than the re^t, of 
slighter build, softer ways; one whose 
hands handle with gentleness, and caress 
with a tender sentiment even such things 
as the tiny ferns that keep the face of 
youth on the gray old walls. So little 
has Antonio to say that when he speaks 
I know not whether it is his messages or 
his voice that charms me mo^. 

His messages are sweet and simple; 
— he found a wounded bird, he dropped 
back into the sea a poor fish left as 
worthless by some fisherman ;— but to 
every ^ory his voice gives that touch that 
” makes the whole world kin”. Full, 
rich, flute-like is the voice of this 
brother, revealing the consummate gift 
8 


of love that is it’s secret. It was this 
voice of Antonio’s that one day gave life 
to a name that otherwise had continued 
to be to me the name of a stranger. In 
recounting the works good and otherwise 
of their neighbors about, the brothers 
often mentioned that of a certain good 
"maestro" — "padre" — "amico" — never 
tiring recounting in detail this good man’s 
benefadions to them and to the poor 
outside their walls. If they spoke his 
name I had let it pass unnoticed until 
one day the brother Antonio added to 
the oft repeated story, "And it was 
love— love! that made the soul of the 
good maestro so beautiful," and my 
interest wakened. 

Love? I questioned, — but Antonio 
was walking away toward the brow of 
the hill that overlooked the gardens of the 
Orcadi Villa and only answered, "love!" 

9 


Then the brothers told me it was 
at the Villa Orcadi that their good 
friend had lived, and that from there he 
had dispensed such benefadions as only 
a princely hand that is the servitor of a 
more princely heart can. 

My portfolio already contained 
many sketches of this lovely villa, shut 
in on all sides but the sea’s among the 
flower-creded waves of its own gardens’ 
splendid bloom. These gardens were 
not open to the public, on the contrary 
were kept closely closed and I owe my 
good fortune in having access to them to 
Leo, who as we chanced to be passing 
one day took advantage of the gate’s 
being open to run in and exchange with 
the gardener those masonic-sort-of-signs 
that edablish the right to a friendly 
acquaintance between men and animals, 
and so reversing the adage ”love me 
10 


love my dog" the gardener for Leo’s 
sake gave me the freedom of this lovely 
place. I had remarked, on the outside 
wall near the gate, a shrine to the Holy 
Virgin hung over with small offerings 
from women and bambinos, who failed 
not to intercede for the safe return of the 
"good padre." 

With his absence they came short 
of many a blessed charity, albeit their 
prayers at the gate-side shrine were in 
no way less fervent. 

Curiosity did not tempt me to 
outrage the privileges the gardener had 
given me but everything pertaining to 
this love-made Eden was of a delightful 
and almost vital intere^ to me. Why ? 
I did not then know, nor did it occur to 
me to want to know. 

A shrine Inside the garden wall 
was high up among the spreading limbs 

II 


of a great pine;— a small shrine of 
exquisite workmanship representing the 
ascension of the Virgin, the figure of 
St. Cecilia kneeling and with hands 
reelings on the strings of her harp, her 
eyes turned aloft in reverent adoration. 
Opposite to this shrine and in near 
proximity was a large over-hanging 
window, so screened and shaded by that 
loveliest of vines the bougainvillea, that 
only the garden-favored would be able 
to discover it. 

The splendid purple bloom of the 
royal vine draped the whole window as 
with lace Tyrian-dyed and hung in long 
feftoons almost to the ground; while the 
clematis and passion flowers climbed the 
walls to meet it from below. Round 
about, thickset in order, rose trees grew 
and bloomed and filled the air with their 
never-to-be-mistaken perfume. 

12 


This window held a charm for me. I 
sketched it in all the phases that the varying 
lights and shadows of the day gave to it. 

In the early morning, before the 
sun drank the dew from the clustering 
bloom, there exhaled a freshness as from 
a world new made: at mid-day the birds 
sought shelter from the sun and turned 
it into a tuneful aviary and in the evening 
the twilight hung it round with a soft 
mistiness that deepening with the night 
let it sink back into its own beautiful 
mystery. MyStery? Why myStery? 
"Did a woman ever — would I know? 
Watch the man 
With whom began 
Love’s voyage,—" 

and if there had 
been such a woman had she found the 
mam "like pure gold, 

— tried by touchstone teSl?" 

* 13 


As often as I sketched this window 
I followed its outlook on and into the 
pine tree shrine and the fancy grew 
strong that both window and shrine were 
the keepers of sweet and dear hi^ories : 
and 1 liked to think how safely they 
would keep them 

"’gainst high and low." 

The one other keeper of all that 
was here bound up with a very real 
dearness, was, I felt sure, the sea. On 
the one open side of the garden — and 
through which the villa looked far into 
the world of men — a flight of half a 
dozen marble ^teps accompanied by every 
manner of stately tree and clustering 
things in green, led from the there 
converging paths down into the blue 
water. The sea had washed the 
marble of these Steps to smoothness and 
tinged it with a green softness wherein 
14 


two lines of legend had been cut. 
"Sweet imaginings are as an air, 

A melody some wondrous singer sings. " 

Here it was I liked to begin and 
end my morning’s or evening’s visit; 
liked to take out my several sketches and 
lay them again^ their own background. 
Was the inspiration of these sweet 
imaginings their air and melody? 

Oh, the charm of romancing with 
the true! 

No one season’s visit to Felice had 
ever been so full of charm and it was 
only after repeated postponement that 1 
came early one morning to say our 
adieux and for a season to leave these 
skies, air, flowers, sea: leave all as we 
found them, — each, 

— "pursuing its own thought — 

No pride, no shame, no vidory, no defeat. " 

* * * * 


15 


The previous evening we had gone 
for our good-by hour with the brothers. 
Antonio’s hand had never lingered so 
long in its caress of Leo nor had his 
voice ever been so near to that of the 
"wondrous singer". Evening invites 
loitering and with nothing more of 
the day to do, a man may let his 
tent ^and open to his will. Monasteries 
however, may not be thus free and 
so when the hour Struck for our 
departure we said a "God bless 
you," — received a "God bless you" 
and with Antonio’s hand clasp laSl 
and longest lingering we went by 
way of Felice to the sea. 

All nature seemed self-abondoned 
through that quiet night. The eyes-of- 
day were closed leaving Star with Star 
in fellowship, the sea and shore in sweet 
companionship — 

16 


"The Strong in Strength, the weak 
in weakness fixed," and, "God’s approval 
on his universe. 

That night— that quiet night!" 

The six smooth, water-washed Steps 
led us up from the sea into the gardens 
of the Orcadi Villa. How close the 
sound to Gardens-of- Arcadia I If close 
the names, here, closer the relationship. 

Good-by we had come to say. 
"Good-by" we said and left, 

"The Muse forever wedded to her lyre, 
The N)Tnph to her fawn, the Silence to 
her rose." 

Then, 

"Round the cape of a sudden came 
the sea. 

The sun looked over the mountain’s rim; 
And Straight was a path of gold for him. 
And the need of a world of men for me." 

* * * * 


17 


From Felice we went by old 
familiar paths into the garden-fields of 
France where year by year millions of 
flowers go to a premature death that the 
soul of them may be saved. The flower 
must go, such the law of these fields, 
but that their fragrance the essential of 
them is saved, quiets the sympathies and 
reconciles this seeming "slaughter of the 
innocents." Still, Leo and I did not 
like the manner of these children’s 
" taking off " — the operation is not delicate, 
the headsmen bungling. Nature is shorn 
of its beauty; the evidence of the love 
of earth, air, sun, rain to the plant, is 
swept by the glecmer’s hand away; the 
pleasure to the eye is gone and the time 
for the conserved fragrance not come. 

There is always left to him who 
likes not, a sure way of escape into other 
fields. If in no other way the wicket- 
18 


of-imagination Elands open between field 
and field, and the unloved drama of one 
field may eatsily enough be relegated to 
that where fancy construds to the 
goddess Flora temples, hangs within 
them incense-burning lamps. Mark the 
fragrance of her children’s lives! This 
ad carries the mind to where it pleasures 
itself ; sees the possibilities of the 
earth-bound, feels the mydic charm of 
relationship that runs through the whole 
process of reincarnation ; a process 
obedient to law and yet triumphant 
over it. 

Year by year Leo and I looked at 
the world’s landscapes from the dear 
vantage ground of our tent’s plateaux, it’s 
fields and mountain heights. Year by 
year we journeyed by the same paths 
into and out of the flower-fields of 
France, and on to the mountains of the 


Elngadine, — loveliest heights they of all 
the lands-of-snow and sunshine ! When 
we had said a year’s good-by to Felice 
and to the garden-fields, we always took 
our way with gipsy indiredlness toward 
the semi-rugged and wholly piduresque 
beauties of that country that slopes so 
gently down from the snows and ice of 
its "everlasting hills" into the valleys, 
groves and meadows of sweet Italy. The 
delight of a wandering way between 
tent ground and tent ground grows as 
we thread the narrow valleys that follow 
the chain of little lakes which lead up 
and out from the land of orange groves 
into the land of pine. 

There was an old love spot for us 
high up and far away in this Engadine 
country, a spot where nature wore a 
splendidly dem face and where her 
atmosphere commanded us rather than 
20 


wooed us as at Felice. This being so, 
we change our manner of approach. 
She is not self abandoned in her 
mountain fastnesses as among gardens of 
her Mediterranean shores, where the 
lover-of-her approaches her with words 
of worshipful adulation. It is with a 
voice ringing and hearty that we salute 
her through the mountain’s crisp air. 

The indiredt way of our going 
gave us the charm of novelty, new 
acquaintance among old familiars, and 
brought us late one afternoon into a 
narrow ascending path from which the 
tall pines shut out the too faSt fading light. 
We walked with that briskness which 
denotes a well defined purpose in travellers 
—the purpose of getting to lodgings before 
night — and in this in^tcmce I believed we 
should fail our purpose and have to make 
the be^t of a foreA’s bivouac. 


21 


It was that same sudden turn in 
the path, that same flash of light 
through the gathering gloom that changed 
for us, as for many a world farer, our 
fortunes. A traveller does not believe 
himself asleep, neither adreaming when 
with brain and nerves alert he is pushing 
along for so definite an objedl as a night’s 
lodging, but with that sudden turn in the 
path, that flash of fight through the pine’s 
deep shadows I quite believed I saw a 
mirage floating in mi^ly dimness above 
me. Not the Orcadi garden with its 
sea-washed marble ileps, neither clinging, 
blooming vines sending their fragrance 
down to me but the villa’s garden side, its 
wondrous window looking out into the 
pine’s high tops and there in one of 
these, the tiny blood red flame burning 
before a replica of the shrine to the 
Holy Virgin! I was willing to believe 
22 


I saw a vision, a mirage vision-like, come 
to re^l among the tree tops high over 
my path. A dream it was, but in 
beauty to the life. How other than in 
a dream should 1 see here, in the heart 
of the Engadine, the counterpart of those 
lovely features of the Orcadi Villa? 
With a curious interest I drew nearer, 
made a slight detour from the path to 
get a better look into the window’s face 
and to see if by shifting my point of 
view the whole would not vanish, sink 
down into the shadows or float away 
with the white clouds that were flecking 
the sky. It did neither, but on the 
contrary discovered to me the solid 
foundations of a mountain chalet. 

Slowly I made a wide circuit round 
about until with wonder and delight in 
happy conflid I Sloped before the door. 
I did not hesitate to knock and in a 


23 


moment my knock was answered by a 
woman, native to the country, and 
who after giving Leo a pleasant 
glance invited us to enter, according 
to us that hospitable welcome which is 
charadteri^lic of the people of the 
mountains. The woman took my 
knapsack, laid it in a comer not far 
removed from the door, while Leo and 
I walked across the white sanded floor 
to the wide fire place in which a small 
fire of pine logs was blazing. 

Treating us more like exjjeded 
travellers than belated ones asking 
hospitality, the woman said in a half 
apologetic way, that her husband was 
late to-night but that he was sure to 
come shortly, and taking from an 
old-fashioned dresser cm extra plate 
proceeded to lay it at the right hand 
of a plate that was on the table next 
24 


the fire. This done she gave me a 
pleasant courtesy and went out through 
a small door that led to the kitchen. 

Looking about the room, as 1 stood 
with my back to the fire, I remarked its 
size and its appointments, which laft 
though wholly suitable to a mountain 
home were not usual either to homes of 
native residents or to those who come 
for the summer season. An unusual 
feature of the room was a low flight of 
^teps, four in number, that extended 
from the chimney to the side wall of the 
room, and covered with a Persian carpet 
that reached on from the upper Sep 
across a shallow landing of some five 
feet to a wall screened with tapeSry, on 
which in colors toned and softened by 
age, a mediaeval hunting scene was 
diSindly visible. This tapeSry hung in 
heavy folds at a point indicating a door. 

25 


On a high-back carved seat between 
two of the recessed windows some good 
skins were thrown, and on the floor a 
large white bear skin, the head evidently 
used for a foot stool. 

The table that was spread for the 
evening meal ^tood not far from the high 
seat and was furnished with simple, 
dainty china, fine thin glass and shiningly 
white silver. A small bowl filled with 
Alpine flowers was placed on the side 
of the table next the seat, and underneath 
the clustering leaves, almoSt hidden was 
a small bell-shaped wine glass. Opposite 
the bowl of flowers and wine glass Stood 
a cushioned chair with arms broad and 
flat on one of which lay a book. 

As the clock Struck seven the 
outside door opened and the woman’s 
husband came in, greeting me respedt- 
fully. Both the man and woman were 
26 


good types of a good kind, and I was 
recounting to the man as I had to his 
wife, the happy chance that had brought 
me to their hospitable roof, when the 
woman came from the kitchen carrying 
the hot dish for the evening meal, and 
giving her husband a smile of greeting, in 
which there was a certain suggestion, 
proceeded to place the dish on the table. 

The man went up to the door 
concealed by the tapestry on the landing 
at the top of the four ^teps and touched 
lightly a bell, then returned to the fireside. 
I had already surmised that these people 
were not the house-holders, but that they 
held a position better than that the title 
servants commonly conveys, was apparent. 
While I waited the real interest I felt 
grew, so that by the time I saw the 
tapestry lifted I had persuaded myself its 
lifting would reveal the figure of a 

27 


woman, as all the indications hereabouts 
warranted my expeding. Not so. A 
man, taller by two inches than six feet, 
stepped almod quickly from beneath the 
raised tapedry, flopped a hardly to be 
perceived moment, and then came 
diredtly down the deps, advancing to 
where I stood gave me his hand and 
bade me welcome with a kindliness 
marked by a dignity that carried it 
almod to the point of dateliness. I had 
many times been the recipient of a kind 
and hearty hospitality from the simple 
mountain folk whose unpretentious doors 
seem to dand open to the belated 
traveller, but this habitation seemed to 
have been purposely hidden away in the 
mountain solitudes, removed presumably 
with intent from any path a traveller 
would be following, and yet Leo and I 
were received with that cordial kindliness 
28 


and with that gracious high-bred courtesy 
extended to expected friends. As I felt 
the touch of the man’s thin warm hand, 
I noticed that the slight smile that parted 
the lips had in it more of the benign 
than the careless movement of pleasure, 
though the man’s manner was one of 
that kind of pleasure that comes from 
the habit of taking joy in all things, 
recognizing and accepting as pleasurable 
any such circumstance as my incidental 
visit. Thus it was that notwithstanding 
this man had evidently removed himself 
with intent from the high-ways of 
the world, he was none the less my 
cordial and hospitable hoSt. With a 
manner of extremeSt courtesy he 
motioned me to the chair to the right 
of the cushioned one, and at the end 
of a moment of grace we sat down at 
the table. 


29 


Looking at my ho^ I saw his rich 
brown hair was touched with gray, his 
eyes dark even to black in the firelight, 
were bright with feeling, calm in their 
movement, while his tall figure was one 
of exceeding grace. His mind held 
supreme command over a fine, nervous 
sensitiveness that vibrated through his 
entire being and gave to him great repose 
of manner but no suppression of a very 
real and altogether charming vivacity. 
Never does the fiber of a man show 
itself so unmistakably as when he 
is approaching the meridian of his 
life’s tenure of office. Is he from 
henceforth to be old ? — the out-ward 
signs unlovely? — the inner being without 
resource? De^iny had not so written 
” among the ^tars” the fate of this man, 
and he had not blurred the written law 
of his destiny. I liked the man! 
30 


Strange?— I had not remarked that 
my host noticed Leo where he lay 
stretched in confident familiarity before 
the fire, until without looking Leo’s 
way he said, "A fine dog you have for 
a companion". Assenting, I explained 
how I had been led by Leo’s sagacity 
into the path that ended in the happy 
chance of this hospitality; to which my 
ho^t made no dired rejoinder but after 
a casual remark about the sagacity of 
animals led the conversation into that 
easiest of channels, travel. In no long 
time we were nearing the Mediterranean, 
traveling surely toward dear Felice: and 
feeling myself to be under the inspiration 
of a good listener I talked on with 
increasing enthusiasm, my words aglow 
with the admiration I felt for all Italy 
but especially for my favorite Felice, and 
the wealth of charm of the world about. 

31 


My ho^l joined in my enthusiasms 
heartily, went with evident delight in 
my going and my coming over the sea 
to Sorrento, to Iscia, to Capri; but how 
came it we never landed at the marble 
S;eps of the Orcadi Villa nor wandered 
through its gardens? How came it the 
wondrous window with its more wondrous 
clinging, fragrant life had not caught from 
afar the artist’s eye ? I felt my avoidance 
of that Arcadia; why did I avoid that 
spot outdoing all others on the shores of 
its sapphire sea ? My seeming ignorance 
of it was a false note, a poor compliment 
to my host and to myself; but when we 
conceive the whole truth may not fly her 
pennant at the fore, no craft does herself 
credit. However, before we had finished 
supper we were friends; that kind of 
friends that knowing nothing know all. 
The magic door had swung lightly on 
32 


its hinges; his hand or mine might now 
easily enough swing it wide into the 
domains of either; and this I saw, that 
there was deep in this man’s soul one 
closed door through which no man might 
pass; neither would any know the times 
and the seasons of his own passing within. 

As our fellowship grew I came to 
que^ion if indeed he ever truly lived on 
the world-side of that door, but I never 
que^ioned from whence that consummate 
joyousness which gave one to feel that 
he came forth to meet the day braced 
with acquiescence in the law of life 
and in its, so far, fulfillment, and that he 
went forward with an almo^ impatient 
expedation. Of what? 

At the end of a short hour my hod 
rose from the table, made the sign of the 
cross, reverently pressing his hand above 
his heart, and taking from the bowl of 

33 


flowers an Alpine rose put it in the 
lappet of his long, fur-lined coat euid 
turned toward the fire. 

It was plain to see that the man 
and woman whom my host named in 
speaking Tomasso and Marta, shared 
in a regard rarely accorded to servants. 
Tomasso placed our chairs near the 
hearth, set a table with a lamp between 
them, and withdrew with his wife to 
the other room. Leo got up from the 
hearth where he had been sleeping the 
sleep of a tired traveller and looking 
into our host’s face sat down close beside 
him. The thin hand, gentle as a 
woman’s, rewarded Leo’s confidence 
with a lingering caress and as I was 
about to tell of brother Antonio’s love 
for my dog, my ho^ asked, — "and have 
you your Felice portfolio with you?" 
For an hour, whatever my words, my 
34 


mind had been busy with the villa and 
its owner, the "good doctor"— "the great 
maestro, padre, prince." With the 
window too so like that other, emd so 
far as climate permitted marvelous in its 
close likeness. How came the window’s 
counterpart here in the heart of this 
mountain-land? And this man, of so 
delicate, rare a personality, was it possible 
that this could be the man of whom the 
Benedidine brothers had said, "there is 
none other like him ! " I questioned and 
yet it now seemed an easy possibility, 
cuid I felt to know my host to be none 
other than the "maestro"—"amico"— 
the prince Orcadi. I brought my portfolio 
to the table and spread out the sketches 
one by one. The fire had burned to a 
comfortable lowness, allowing us to sit 
so near that its light added a warmth 
and glow without which the sketches 

35 


would have lacked the mellow richness 
that made them true to life. As I held 
one and another in the soft glow of the 
firelight and made comment on the place 
and time it was sketched, his eyes and 
voice gave me unstinted praise. It 
seemed to me each sketch received a 
caress-like touch, and one, without 
apparent intent, he laid where his arm 
rented upon it and as though to decide 
between its merits and some other often 
looked at it. 

My sketches were not for sale that 
he knew, and he made no reference to 
his acquaintance with the scenes they 
represented. The clock on the high 
mantel shelf struck eleven before my hoft 
made the move for good night, and 
when he did he held the sketch of his 
choice in one hand saying, "I would see 
this in the early morning light— and now, 
36 


how may I name you who have brought 
my Italy, — my home— to me?" That 
short moment, that small measure of time 
not to be defined, dropped its silence 
between us and then giving him my name 
I saluted him with the not-to-be-disguised 
reference I felt for "the good" — "the 
great padre et maestro" — "the 
beloved Prince Orcadi". 

He held my hand in earnest grasp, 
then wishing me sound sleep called 
Tomasso to show me to my room, and 
ascended the flight of four ^teps with 
that nervous movement which was so 
marked a charadteristic of his manner. 
Leo had followed him, keeping close to 
his side, and as though to interpret the 
dog’s desire as well as his own, he said, 
"If you will allow the dog to indulge 
his mood I believe he will domicile with 
me," and patting Leo, added, "Eh, my 

37 


fine fellow?”. The voice rather than 
the words betrayed more than the 
interpretation of the dog’s wish, but with 
only a second ”good night” the quick 
nervous hand pushed aside the tapestry 
that hung before the door, and the tall 
figure of Orcadi with Leo his henceforth 
constant companion, passed through and 
closed the door. 

Tomasso lighted a candle, took up 
my knapsack and went before me to the 
room at the end of the landing. No 
room on first acquaintance had seemed 
so entirely mine. I went diredly to one 
of the three windows. Outside the night 
was full of the sounds of the fore^, the 
gentle rain of pine needles falling 
ceaselessly down; the almost as gentle 
ru^le of the leaves in their gossip with 
the passing breezes, while through them, 
and as though to lend sandion to their 
38 


communings the white light from the 
window met and mingled with the dim 
red rays that fell from the Virgin’s lamp. 

Stillness was supreme and looking 
out into the night, again I questioned, 
”Did a woman ever — would I know! — 
Watch the man 
With whom began 

Love’s voyage ” 

and then I answered, 

"Thou art a man" — and knoweA, 
"For the lake its swan; 

For the dell, its dove — " 

* * * * 

TTie next morning at so early an 
hour as to give me right to suppose I 
was the fir^l a^tir, I went out onto the 
path of our coming the night before, but 
I was not the fir^. Leo bounded to 
meet me, and near by sitting on a rustic 
bench beneath the pines I saw my hoit. 

39 


His greeting sincere and hearty was in 
harmony with a nature that held no 
discords in its own nor created them in 
another, and so I readily shared with 
him his expressed belief that the episode 
of my visit was a bit of good fortune. 
Why it was so, or was to be so we both 
felt to be — 

"A fad beyond the power of 
proving." — 

A little loitering about brought us 
to the breakfad hour, after which, 
agreeable to my hod’s wish, we set off 
for a leisurely climb by way of a scarcely 
defined path that led us into the face of 
the fad rising sun. Here was the 
deliciously crisp air, the glorious 
mountains, the deep silences, the world 
above a world! Without over-much 
speech, in that one morning’s walk 
acquaintanceship warmed into com- 
40 


panionship — or better, fellowship — 
beil name of all! Does this often 
happen? No miracle is repeated 
in any life. 

My thought had been that I would 
pitch my tent in some not di^ant 
neighborhood to San Fidele (the name 
of the Orcadi chalet,) and come and go 
as I had between the villa and Felice; 
but my host’s thought was that I should 
come and go from San Fidele leaving 
my tent unfolded. It were not possible 
to have hesitated in my decision : nothing 
could have pleased me more : so that by 
the time of our return to the chalet we 
had more plans afoot than my portfolio 
numbered pidures. 

Everywhere through these mountain 
ranges there were highways and byways 
to be explored, everywhere solitudes 
waiting to be discovered — work to be 

41 


done. To both, the kind of fellowship 
that held us was a novelty, to neither a 
hindrance. The silences remained as 
deep, the solitudes as sublime, but 
movement caught fresh inspiration; took 
on the ways of the spring torrents that 
though they kept within the confines of 
their mountain highways went with the 
joy of increased energy, with a spontaneity 
bom of the sur-charge. Soon we adopted 
the happy routine of leaving San Fidele 
arm in arm emd pretty surely so returned 
together — but there were hours of 
straying off at will and when we met 
we never questioned, 

"Where have you been a-field to-day? 
"What violets, roses gathered there? 
"What trees have planted, tall and fair? 
"What song-birds heard in upper air? 

Day by day these delightful 
excursions through the solitudes of 
42 


the Eiigadine mountains went uninter- 
ruptedly on, and to whatever other 
objedtive point our day’s walk led us 
there was one we never failed to arrive 
at. It was by way of a narrow larch- 
bordered path, that turning to the we^ 
from the more open one ran at a slight 
incline into the deeper fore^ and there 
terminated at a plateau on which ^tood 
a small and wondrously beautiful chapel- 
shrine. Masses of rock had at some 
long gone time shelved off from the 
mountain’s side and piling themselves on 
a lower ledge had created a plateau 
whereon safely stood this chapel-shrine. 
During the summer months the door to 
this chapel ^tood open giving to sun and 
wind unre^rided access, and through all 
seasons the door was on the latch. 
Whether my surprise at fird seeing so 
lovely a bit of architedure hid away in 

43 


the forest’s depth arose purely because 
of the architedural merit of the chapel 
or because my imagination had been 
romancing with the life of Orcadi, I did 
not determine, but whatever the cause 
of my surprise the mystery here enshrined 
was one that held the only true right of 
mystery, the sacred. 

Above the altar hung a rarely 
beautiful pidlure of the Virgin, before it 
a small sanduary lamp burned, and this 
was near enough to the organ to throw 
its dim light upon the key-board. 
At the organ Orcadi was indeed 
maestro and every evening he played 
through the sunset hour, summoning "its 
keys to their work", — amd "making the 
organ obey". 

By and by all this ideality of our 
Ejigadine life came to be accepted by 
me as natural, and in truth it was, since 
44 


Orcadi’s extraordinary charader could 
not have made the mod extraordinary 
phases of life other than ideally natural. 
Of drangeness there was from the fird 
an absence. Delightful as phenomenal 
this, and made the real charm of our 
valued friendship. As I lidened to 
il maestro e amico mio make 
the "organ obey" his commands, my 
eyes were always intently dudying the 
beauty of the chapel’s appointments. 
The marble walls were of a mellowed 
richness, the groined roof held the 
organ’s sounds as softly as it did its 
own shadows, and the windows so 
pressed about by the fored’s green, 
were no more than framework which 
the trees might enter. The altar was 
over-spread with a cover of antique 
lace, and the candledicks and cross like 
the lamp were of silver. Looking at 

45 


these rich appointments my mind often 
pleased itself in wondering if, as at 
San Fidele, a woman’s refined ta^te 
had joined with that of il maestro 
in producing these harmonious effects, 
and through the pleasant wondering 
imagination made pidlures as vibrant 
with life as those made by the 
trees, gently swaying in and out of 
the chapel windows. 

The twilight after the sunset hour 
was long, and through it we went 
leisurely back to Fidele there to carry 
to completion a manual on the Flora 
of the Elngadine which Orcadi had for 
a long time been writing. To the end 
that this manual be properly completed 
our excursions had been a necessity, and 
as of the detail of indexing matter and 
chapters Orcadi was not fond, I took a 
lively interest as well as delight in 
46 


bringing the scattered notes into rank 
and file. One evening we seemed to be 
doing less work than usual, and finally 
abandoned it altogether, taking up in 
its place a portfolio of sketches that had 
some days before been forwarded to me. 
These sketches were done in Italy, in 
Sicily, and in southern France, those 
lands of imagination and inspiration the 
purest. We turned these sketches over, 
much as we had done those on the fir^ 
night of my arrival. There seemed to 
me a shade of sadness or something 
better defined as pathos— shy and elusive — 
marked Orcadi’s manner. Vivacity 
gave place to a calmness that settled like 
a melancholy about the eyes of the 
maestro and the slim nervous fingers 
buried themselves in the long hair of 
Leo’s head to remain there in that sort 
of caress which a man gives to a dumb 

47 


animal when his spirit is under a 
sur-charge of feeling. 

I continued to move the sketches 
about commenting on this or that scene 
that had charmed my brush in the 
doing, and on this or that incident 
inspiring interest in the doing; and with 
an unnecessary loitering about the garden- 
fields of France I kept away from my 
be^l loved of all— Felice! Why? I 
was glad Orcadi did not ask that 
que^ion or possibly I had never heard 
how he thought one of my field sketches 
worthy a Fra Angelico paradise, worthy 
to be made part of a composition he 
then and there told me I muit do for 
him. An altar piece this composition 
was to be,— an altar piece with a figure 
of St. Cecilia, the background a Fra 
Angelico garden. "Not" said Orcadi 
"is this altar pidure to be created from 
48 


any traditional ideal you may have in 
your mind, but from an ideal 1 have for 
long had in mine. To transmit this 
ideal St. Cecilia from my mind to yours 
and watch you give to her fitting form 
and color will be a charm out-doing all 
others of our life here at Fidele! 

The idea birred my imagination, 
and though I interrupted my master 
with countless que^ions 1 likened with 
an absorbed attention to his masterful 
delineation of attitude, expression, 
draping, and all the detail of that poetic 
conception which he transmitted so 
clearly to my understanding that I saw 
with a vivid diStindness in my own mind 
the truly beautiful ideal in his. 

It was late that night when Orcadi 
and Leo passed behind the arras. Had 
I been too long looking at the halo that 
crowned the St. Cecilia of his thoughts 

49 


that, for one moment, I saw such a circle 
of light float out and away through the 
open window? 

1 did not soon fall asleep. My mind 
reSed agreeably on the wings of its own 
imagination )nelding nothing to the claims 
of sleep. Before the sunrise I went out 
to walk about over the noiseless pavement 
of pine needles. They smothered any 
echo of footsteps that could easily enough 
have reached the over-hanging window. 
The sun was deepening the red glow in 
the sky and its unclouded rays turning 
the foreS into a glory, when through an 
open latticed pane of the window I heard 
Orcadi’s greeting and in its tone of 
natural gladsomeness. 

* * * * 

From the time the out door air had 
made it possible we breakfasted under 
the pines, and on this morning as we sat 
50 


at the little table I did not try to suppress 
the eagerness I felt to set to work on the 
altar piece, nor did I try to hide my 
delight. Better ^till I felt that inspiration 
which an artist knows is vital to success. 
I drew it and continued to draw it from 
a ma^er mind, I was to create from the 
pidure held in that mind, and not only 
did this idea lend zed to the undertaking 
but the belief fixed itself in my mind that 
the measure of my success would be the 
measure of Orcadi’s gratification; the 
which could I render complete, would 
give him the chance to breathe that one 
Amen! without whose passing over the 
lips, men die poor. 

It was plain to me that the desire 
to have such an altar piece had long 
been an earnest wish of his heart, and 
now an opportunity the happied in the 
world for me, had given into my hand 

51 


the task of making good to him this wish 
of preserving his ideal. His long time 
wish became mine, and though we were 
both clearly impatient to set up the canvas 
and begin, yet we wandered about through 
the limitless isles of our forest cathedral 
that entire day, feeling it a worshipful 
place in which to fit for the trial at the 
rendering of an ideal. With the setting 
of the sun our day of procraSination 
and preparation came to an end, and 
when we said good-night it was settled 
that the canvas should be set up on the 
morrow. That over-night determination 
was true to the tradition of over-night 
plans. In the morning we had only to 
settle on a suitable studio comer; the 
way of the work was plain. 

I put the question of place, Orcadi 
cmswered it sa)ang, "the bright, full light 
of a window in my little cabinet will be 
52 


the best; besides giving you the advantage 
of painting the pidure in the light in 
which it is to hang", and turning toward 
his own apartments he raised the heavy 
arras and bade me enter. I do not 
know why I should have been surprised 
or why for one scarcely to be perceived 
moment, I hesitated to obey, but I could 
not have been more surprised had a 
priest of the Greek Church asked me to 
follow him into the innermost sanduary. 
With this feeling in full possession of me 
I followed him into the windows recess, 
and though I was conscious of taking no 
note of the surroundings yet I had a well 
defined feeling of being in an atmosphere 
enhanced if not created by surroundings. 

Orcadi busied himself in settling 
me to my work, giving no sign that my 
introdudion to this little cabinet had cod 
him more than a necessary thought, but 

53 


I was fully conscious that it had. Fidele, 
like the villa in its paradise garden, held 
a wonder-charm for me, emd nowhere 
did I feel it as in that window where was 
every quality of light, from the golden 
slant of the sun’s rays in the full morning 
to the same rays light in the late afternoon 
refledted from the glistening tops of the 
far snow mountains. 

While I arremged for work Orcadi 
brought a small table and placing it by 
my side laid upon it a portfolio. I was 
impatient to begin cmd did; sketching the 
outlines of the composition as I conceived 
it was to be. With the afternoon hour 
we went for our walk and once outside 
I felt the liveliest satisfadion that I was 
to do my work in an atmosphere and 
with surroundings that would help me 
to attainment. No long or uncertain 
Striving would be necessary, and I was 
54 


glad that this fir^ day held no more than 
the one preliminary ^lep toward the 
painting of the St. Cecilia. 

Nature was never more beneficent 
to the seeking spirit of a man than 
through the afternoon of that summer 
day, and turning often to Orcadi as we 
trolled along, I remarked how, 

"—oft the man’s soul springs into his 
face 

As if he saw again and heard again" 
It was pa^t the sunset hour when we 
left the forest chapel, wherein as the 
last notes of the organ died away a 
silence fell, deep as that of the great 
mountains through which we took our 
way back to Fidele. 

The next morning we acfted from a 
tacit understanding and arm in arm, and 
Leo by our side, we dropped the heavy 
tapeStry curtain behind us and immediately 

55 


sat down to our work. II mio 
maestro placed his chair within easy 
reach of mine and entered with so much 
of charm of speech and smile upon our 
doing that I thought, true! 

"Not even the tendere^t heart, and 
next our own. 

Knows half the reason why we 
smile or sigh." 

We began our work by Orcadi 
taking from his portfolio a small sketch, 
a mere outline of the figure of a woman, 
complete, full of true feeling and a figure 
of extreme grace. Looking at this 
artift’s sketch I exclaimed with unfeigned 
admiration, "II maestro mio! and I 
am to compare my work with yours?" 
Orcadi laughingly replied, "Ah! you 
are maestro of all else besides the 
mere outline, with color I’ve no gift, and 
until now I’ve been content to leave to 
56 


imagination the happy work of filling the 
lines with tones to suit. There is freedom 
in this method and no danger of getting 
sun-rise with sun-set colors confused. 
This idea has so long held with me that 
until your sketches proselyted me I 
believed color to be a blemish in art; and 
to the support of this belief I brought 
that highest consummation of the ideal 
in art, the statue." "Nothing truer" I 
answered, "and yet I love color far too 
well not to be willing to dare it". 

The brightest of days followed and 
the sunshine of the next two months 
mixed its colors with those that over- 
spread the cemvas and filled the lovely 
outlines with a glow as of life. At the 
end of those two months our St. Cecilia 
was finished, and when I compared the 
outcome of the maestro’s ideal with 
that of various artists who had essayed 

57 


the same pleasing subjedt I was satisfied. 
II maestro had with an art all his own 
clearly refledted the image that held his 
mind into mine, I had seen and felt it as 
I would have done a real model. Aye, 
those were rare days to my exultant 
imagination ! 

Diredlly the work was done we 
carried it to the chapel-shrine and placed 
it above the organ’s key-board, there to 
represent the patron saint to whom the 
chapel had been dedicated. 

Was it fancy or no that made 
Orcadi’s pla)ang thereafter sound as 
from a hand doubly inspired? Certain 
it is that ever after the portrait was 
there placed, our visits to the shrine took 
on a freshened pleasure which we both 
acknowledged and neither of us were at 
a loss to underhand. It is not falsehood 
that makes a man play round about a 
58 


happy truth and leave it unnamed. 

On went the weeks gladsomely, 
the early Autumn began its approach 
giving to the mountains added beauty. 
Through this we had made an unusually 
long walk on a day half sunshine half 
cloud, and coming where two ways met 
Orcadi took the way toward San Fidele 
while I keeping Leo with me went with 
my gun an hour’s climb farther. As 
the day drew to its close the clouds 
gathered in heaviness about and the wind 
blew fitfully. I hurried on toward the 
chapel and nearing heard Orcadi playing 
as was his cuSom at this hour of the 
day, but whether it was the ^tate of the 
atmosphere that gave to the organ’s 
notes a depth of sound I had never heard 
before or whether II maestro was 
playing under an inspiration bom of the 
coming Aorm, I knew only I had never 

59 


heard the organ give him such response. 
Often in his playing I had heard as it 
were a song, a pastoral in its sweet 
freshness; had almost seen the vines and 
flowers of his lovely garden by the sea 
climb and blossom at the feet of his St. 
Cecilia and shed their perfume around 
her; had heard these sweet paflorals 
gather force as though they sought to 
equal the deep music of the Engadine 
forests, but I had not heard such wildly 
ecstatic volume of sound ever before come 
from this rock-set organ. Beginning with 
the tendere^t of minor notes and sweet 
semitones it gathered and augmented 
sound on sound, harmonized, lifted them 
together until they mounted up beyond 
their own limitations to bur^t in one 
sublime oratory above cmd beyond the 
chapel’s confines. Thought and feeling 
were no longer among the minor chords 
60 


or the scarce audible monotones of dull, 
worn sounds, but were gathered and 
sublimed into the highest harmonies of 
which they are capable. 

And Orcadi — il caro maestro 
mio! — what of him whose soul was 
ma^er of his hands? He, whose soul 
was invoking all that the spirit of music, 
all that the spirit of the Sorm had to 
give? Plainly the elements were let 
loose in the far upper fastnesses of the 
mountains as well as in the upper air. 
The thunder now rolled with no uncertain 
or intermittent sound and wild waves of 
rain swept the trees into billows. The 
mountain torrents loSt the notes of the 
pastoral song they were wont to give 
and went raging by in masses of broken 
foam: the sun waited in vain behind the 
dense and angry clouds that each moment 
dropped lower shutting off the laSl of 


the day’s light. Was Nature herself 
stricken, ainguished, that all at once she 
sent forth a cty as of wounded to death ? 
Together with, and through the wailing 
and roaring of the wind, the rattling of 
the rain, the tumultuous rush of the 
waters and the deep deadening peals of 
thunder, there flashed sharp and incisive 
a death-dealing shaft of fire. I sprang to 
my feet. Did I ^till hear the orgam’s notes 
reverberating with the other anguished 
sounds? Slowly all sound receded, its 
echos grew fainter and a strange silence 
settled, a silence such as might re^t if 
the sea refused to flow again upon the 
shore from whence it had ebbed. 

There are hours of which we know 
not the minutes, but at their end there 
comes a sharp consciousness. This 
consciousness was upon me and I 
questioned not its message. The Starless 
62 


sky left a heavy darkness above the 
forest’s gloom so that when I entered the 
chapel the candles seemed to be burning 
with unusual brilliancy, such brilliancy 
that for a moment I thought Orcadi had 
lighted all the candles on the altar as 
well as those on either side of the organ. 
For one moment I stopped. Was it to 
listen? Full well I knew the portent of 
that silence and yet I listened. 

Orcadi sat at the organ, his hands 
renting on the keys, his head bent forward 
and renting againft the lower edge of the 
St. Cecilia. Was ever silence so silent? 
The little red light in the sanduary 
lamp burned deadily, as deadily as it 
would bum on — forever. What is 
forever? Certainly it is never am 
unlit time. 

No refuge of thought remained to 
me, — and my heart made the only 

63 


audible sound in that silent silence. I 
went to my friend’s side, stooped and 
lifted his bent form until his head 
rented against my breaS. The light 
in the eyes was quenched, the heart 
was ^till. 

"The shadows fell from roof to arch 
Dim was the incensed air. 

One lamp alone with trembling ray. 
Told of the presence there." 

* * * * 

Five days after that one on which 

il maestro had evoked from the 

chapel-organ all the tender and all the 
tragic sounds that music guards, a mass 
was said. 

* * * * 

The organ was silent again, and 
the little sanduary lamp kept watch for 
two. Side by side beneath the altar, 
lay the "great prince", "the kind padre", 
64 


il mio caro amico et maestro 
and his St. Cecilia. 

* * * * 

The pleasure of my life at San 
Fidele, which from fir^ to la^l was the 
ideal thing we call a dream, lo^t its 
joyousness. How other? That wondrous 
spirit, the very incarnation of Spring had 
gone out from the life that was no life 
without him. But my friend and ma^er 
had not left me free to go from Fidele. 
He had laid the hand of a pleasant if 
pathetic duty upon me, the fulfilling of 
which kept unbroken much the same 
kind of communion we had enjoyed 
together. I was under a command, or 
what in so close a friendship is its 
equivalent — a wish — the carrying forward 
of which was of far too much interest to 
me to allow of the despoiling effeds of 
a selfish sorrow. My command was as 

65 


explicit as engaging. Various charities 
in the Engadine country and round about 
Felice were to be carried forward, but 
nearest to my heart was the work that 
lay here at Fidele. 

The chalet was to be converted 
into a church. A church here in these 
silent mountains where the peasant folk 
had been content to kneel on the wet 
atones of the wayside shrine or bring 
their offering of field flowers up to the 
maeSlro’s chapel. And now these simple 
folk were to receive a gift, a personal 
gift to each it would be, they were to 
worship without burden of tax of any 
sort within a church. 

At once I knew the end the chalet 
was to serve, I easily recognized how 
its general plan and dimensions lent 
themselves to the transformation, and I 
doubted not this intent had entered into 
66 


the original building plans. The four 
broad ^eps that separated the large room 
from those of Orcadi would mark the 
auditorium proper and lead to the 
chancel. The altar would be within the 
beautiful window, the con^trudion of 
which for this purpose was perfed. The 
soft amber colored glass diffused a rich 
and mellow light throughout the hours of 
the mid-day and gave a seeming length as 
well as added brightness to those of the 
morning and evening. No other color 
medium could have so well harmonized 
all of the sun’s moods, making the light 
whether glowing or somber alike golden. 

The organ was to fill the place 
occupied by the old carved seat that 
dood between the two windows of the 
large room,— their light falling with 
many a glint of sunlight across the 
table and its bowl of Alpine roses. 

67 


Before any part of this transformation 
should be entered upon there was to be 
built for Tomasso and Marta a chalet 
midway between San Fidele and the 
chapel -shrine. Tomasso would be 
sacriSan of the church in which Marta 
was charged with the care of the 
santftuary lamp and the altar. The detail 
which interested me moSt in this 
transformation of the chalet into the 
church was, the disposition to be made 
of the old carved seat and of a rarer 
cheSt whose home was in the little 
cabinet where we had painted the St. 
Cecilia. For richness and smoothness of 
carving it rivaled that of the crucifix that 
Stood upon it. Every part of this rarely 
beautiful cheSl was to be employed about 
the organ. The panels, representative 
of the life of the sweet Saint of Music, 
were to be set in the face of the organ, 
68 


round about the key-board the worshipful 
faces of adoring saints, together with the 
exquisite garlands of flowers that made a 
frieze-like finish to the top of the che^t. 

When 1 had seen Orcadi open this 
cheft 1 noted it was with a careful 
consideration that he took from it a fine 
sable robe which, when the weather was 
cold, he laid across his knees, and it was 
the remembrance of this that decided me 
to lay this same robe reverently over him 
when we carried him from the little 
cabinet down to the deep rock tomb 
beneath the altar. 

Apparently the cheSt was without 
other contents and Orcadi made record 
of none. When the time came for 
preparing the cheft for its new service 
I set about taking it apart myself and 
in the doing there was the happy 
incentive of a very loyal sentiment. 

69 


Orcadi had left an impress of reverent 
love on all about, not only upon the 
lives of men and women but upon 
objeds that shared association with 
lives dear to him. An old rosary 
that had lain in the pulsing palm of 
some anxious mother, a crucifix that 
had been kissed by the trembling lips 
of a penitent were not lifeless things, but 
things vibrant with a life more real than 
that of the human who walks unawak- 
ened on his way. Feeling the life 
pulses that had made sacred the objeds 
about him, Orcadi had guarded and 
handled them with a considerate as 
well as reverent love, and so had given 
to them so much of his own personality 
that they could not be to me objeds of 
indifference. Therefore when this ched 
that had long occupied a specially 
favored place in his little cabinet 
70 


as 


well as had been the keeper of an 
article which he had never touched 
without a visible tenderness, it was not 
possible to allow it to pass into irreverent 
hands. Furthermore I deferred the day 
as long as might be. Its transformed 
life would be long, I had known its 
present life here with my friend, to 
change it would be like losing sight of 
a dear familiar face which in whatever 
form it would appear again would yet 
be another, not the dear old familiar! 

When I did decide upon the day 
for the cheat’s removal from its home in 
the cabinet room I took Leo with me, a 
silent witness but one on whose sympathy 
I could count. The old che^t returned 
our salutation through the smiles of the 
sunlight that fell with a glory of bright- 
ness upon it, and its response to my 
hand’s touch was in^ind with life. The 


day was drawing to a close, it was the 
hour of the organ playing, already a 
twelve month gone, — that hour in which 
so much silence had followed passion, 
so much silence joy. I raised the year- 
shut-lid of the che^l and though I 
hesitated as on that fateful evening in 
the chapel-shrine yet I was driven by a 
feeling Stem as a command to go forward. 
There are times, when a man’s will is 
not supreme, times in which he feels it 
takes no glory, no exultation in conquest. 
The thing to be conquered yields with- 
out warfare, submits without rebellion, 
and in this kind of conquest the will 
pelds up its part to the beheSt of 
the spirit. 

The air was filled with the even- 
song of birds and inseds, and the wind 
kept the leaves in gentle murmur. As 
in the Villa’s garden, — the day on which 
72 


Leo and I had said our good-by, — so 
now on this evening in the Engadine 
forest, was 

"All nature self-abandoned, every 
tree 

Flung as it will, pursuing its own 
thoughts— 

No pride, no shame, no vidory." 
I leaned over and looked into the empty 
ched, repeating, 

"No pride, no shame, no vidory." 

Leo rubbed caressingly againd me 
and I said, "Witness Leo, no pride of 
conqued, no curiosity to create shame, 
no exultant vidory". 

Knowing Orcadi as I did I felt 
sure he would leave nothing of so delicate 
a personal nature as letters for any other 
than himself to dispose of, and this belief 
proved to my delight to be true, but 
there was manuscript of which I was 

73 


forced to conclude he knew nothing, 
and which if not intended for him had 
surely been by him inspired. The 
oftener I turned the pages of the 
manuscript the more fully was revealed 
to me how the spirit of the writer had 
responded to the spirit of her mae^ro — 
and mine — always mine! Here was a 
bond. What should I ? By a chain of 
circum^ance the bond between these 
two lives and mine had become close — 
so close that I had come into an 
inheritance. Leo bore witness how in 
its acceptance and in its disposition there 
was ”No pride, no shame, no vidory”. 
* * * * 

The four comers of the che^t were 
held together by springs that easily 
relaxed their hold, and juil beneath the 
lock so close as indeed to be part of it 
was a small bolt, which when pushed 
74 


back set free a slide in the panel and 
revealed the chef’s sanduary. Here it 
was that the manuscript, leaf on leaf 
f3ang between embossed leather covers, 
had been— by whose hand ?— left. I did 
not need to unclasp its fadenings or to 
look at the contents to realize that 
somewhere there had indeed been a St. 
Cecilia in Orcadi’s life. 

What is it that marks unmidakably 
the difference between the belongings of 
men and women ? — or even more between 
those of women and women ? However 
they be filleted with ribbons, clasped 
with gold or laid in lavender for a day 
or a year there is a touch that leaves a 
not-to-be-midaken aroma, the value of 
which is its index to charadler. 

Holding this volume in my hands 
there exhaled the perfume of the pines 
and of the sea. Near by the pine 

75 


needles carpeted the ground beneath 
San Fidele’s windows, farther away that 
"deep blue sea" was Still washing to a 
like smoothness the marble of the 
Villa’s Steps and the shores of the 
near-by Hesperia. 

* * * * 

The manuscript with its sandified 
marks and perfumes answered the question 

"did a woman ever " 

and left 

"—my heart to guess" 

how " she sang perhaps; 

So, the old wall throbbed, and its 
life’s excess 

Died out and away in the leafy 
wraps. 

Wall upon wall are between us; life 
And song should away from heart 
to heart!" 


76 


THE MANUSCRIPT 








HESPERIA 



ILLED with ever recurring 
happy coincidences life 
grows clearer, dearer, 
nearer to me. Days 
there were, and not so 
long ago, that glowed 
with a brightness all their 
own; they were the la^l 
of one season the fir^t of 
another. What seasons? 
Now the year itself is 
closing 2ind a new one 
opening, and with a pleaisant augury the 
contiguous days are repeating the joys of 
those seasons. If the journey of the 

79 


years really goes hand in hand with 
certain — or every season of them — they 
must keep coming in contad with the 
joys that made the brightness the 
clearer, dearer, nearer-of-life. 

It is no foolish imagination to think 
of Time as silver-footed, neither an 
exaggeration to feel that she moves 
harmonious among these seasons and 
that she counts not by days or years. 
This is the choicest of earth’s blessings 
and is immortal as well. In it is youth’s 
freshness and luxuriance, candor and 
truth. There is no lie in it about death 
but a lifting up to life, to efficiency 
and content. 

Because of this, caro maestro, 
you hear me tell you of life — my life and 
your life!— its happiness and grief alike 
in joyous uttercuices. If I did not write 
thus you might know you were not in 
80 


my thoughts’ communion, and that I had 
forgotten you are a hearer of the silver- 
footed. But no, I remember! and 
besides, here about me, are the 
inexpressibly dear evidences of your 
hands’ ministrations. Trifling? There 
is nothing trifling in love, from the 
hand’s simplest service to duty’s endless 
obligation. 

If I would give a name to rival that 
of Time’s — a companion to the silver- 
footed, it would be the swift-footed, 
and being equally true in its significant 
Greek -beauty to the silver -footed, 1 
appropriate it euid make it over to you, 
yours to be: and too, to be proof that 1 
go about intent on pilfering every good 
thing for you. Mercury, the God of 
Theseus, will have plenty to do in 
patronizing my hero role. 

When we set out for our cruise in 


81 


Italy’s waters you inscribed on my 
pennon at the fore 

lO VI AINTERO. 
and there it is no whit out-luAered by 
£iny newer-made inscription on any mast- 
head pennant that here goes gallantly 
by. The poor prisoner who, when 
released after solitary confinement, asked 
to return to his dungeon because no one 
knew him, furnishes pathetic proof of 
how little value life without recognition. 
The casting of that pennant to the 
breeze assured my mind and quieted its 
apprehensions. 

You recognized the wingless mind 
that weighed me down, and going 
before taught me not to feel responsible 
for results but only for conscientious 
efforts toward results. It is on this 
principle that we hope for a complete 
State of bliss, a heaven: in the meantime 
82 


doing our be^l towards attaining. There 
is always that we seek for beyond our 
reach, that we look for beyond our ken. 
If this were not so hope would have no 
place in our efforts nor would our efforts 
be of the noble^. The will has no 
power to insure adual success, but only 
over the means toward success, else we 
would not see plans and schemes, with 
every apparent element of success 
attending them, fail. You, mio 
maestro, taught me this: taught me 
to press and urge my will against these 
to the end that I might hold the results 
in my hand. And yet, with reason, I 
believe this had not been, had you not 
surrounded me by a thousand fortuitous 
conditions, involved the means with your 
own achievements and at the very ilart 
inspired my every effort with the promise 
lO VI AINTERO! 


83 








^'‘HERE is a rose-leaf-touch, 
a lavender- like fragrance 
that comes from doing with 
fitting propriety that which 
environment and circumstance 
call for. Completeness and 
finish ought not to be unique 
results in effort, neither fresh- 
ness and refinement universal 
qualities only, however they 
may seem to be away and 
beyond the common effort. But this, I 
suppose, is a matter of taSle in doing, 
not a fundamental principle any more 
than is mood — or moods, under whose 

85 


impulse so much is done, so much not 
done. Nature ought to be the law- 
giver about moods, legitimist that she is. 

Life! Life! is the sublime motif 
of her moods, to which, however she 
may wander away into the season’s 
countless variations she never fails to 
come back with unerring fidelity; never 
fails to advance in regular crescendo out 
from one season into another; up from 
deStrudion into conSlrudion; no caprice 
in down pulling, none in upbuilding; all 
variation under the law legitimate, and 
she the law giver. Listening to the 
rhythm that comes with the waves in 
shore to spread with a rapturous sort of 
vibration, I feel glad that nature at this 
season gives nothing more than this 
expression of herself, keeping her deeper 
thoughts to herself. Were it otherwise, 
did she turn over to any those secrets 
86 


deeper than the sea’s, discover the 
treasures of her hidden mines, to what 
untimely death would go search and 
research, and where would be the happy 
hunting grounds of imagination? Effort 
would be dethroned by knowledge, a 
man’s reach not exceeding his grasp, 
imagination and inspiration would fall 
unwinged to earth. 

"The wind with its wants, and its 
infinite wail" 

would be hushed, the delight of the 
unsatisfied song loS in the monotony 
of satisfadion. 

With the wind satisfied, no want 
more, from whence would come that 
breath which fans to life the seedling in J 
its close rock crevice ? — and from whence 
would arise that triumphant acclaim 
when obedience to law makes "low 
nature better by its throes"? 


87 


In a time we call old, the women 
of Greece sung songs at sunrise to 
Apollo, aspiring to be gratified and 
satisfied. They took of the grain and 
the flowers and the fruit and laid them 
on the altars and the larks carried these 
women’s songs of praise and prayer far 
up toward the blue empyrean gates. 
When they came again what answer 
brought they to the expedant women? 
Did they as they alighted on the altar’s 
edge, lay mid the fruit and flowers and 
grain the answers to the prayers for 
gratifications and satisf adions ? A return 
for the offerings made? 

Over the heads of those expedant 
women shone the blue of their beautiful 
sky, and beyond it they saw a light as from 
luminous gold. "There! There!" they 
cried, "is the land of our desire, let it 
come to us here, let it come to us here!" 
88 


This dream has not ended with the 
singing at sunrise neither the prayers 
sent up at the altar’s side by these 
Grecian women, but have not their less 
classic sifters learned that the land-of- 
desire, the land of the golden light comes 
not visibly down? 


89 





PESOLATION is a deli- 
cate thing; 

— treads with silent foot- 
steps, and fans with 
silent wing — " 

and marks its way with silent 
ruins. But, what of its 
beauty? Is it not in any 
landscape a creator of that 
kind of ideality which clings 
like the vines close cuid fine, 
giving a needed touch to what otherwise 
would be without the finished? 

From the groves of Daphne in their 
gloiy we might turn away, but Daphne’s 

91 


groves silent, holding in their deep shade 
the ruins of "the mighty fallen—" are a 
lure and a delight. The wind moves 
the leaves with the "silent wing", the 
water of the cascades fills the air with 
sound as of mysterious voices, the half 
hidden crags send an echo of the yet- 
lingering music, and the grassy dells are 
Strewn with blossoms brilliant and fiery 
as those tongues of flame that made of 
her temple’s glory a beautiful ruin, of 
her groves a delicate desolation. 

If generation after generation has 
added fresh splendors to the altars 
of Daphne’s gods, generation after 
generation adds to the silent splendor 
of their desolation, until it is no more 
a desolation but a thing of beauty 
and ideality. If once 

"It seemed each fruit that blushed, 
each bud that blew. 


92 


All spoke of ladle’s hope, of ladle’s 
love — " 

so, now It seems, neither Is the hope, 
the love changed, unless they are 
sweeter and deeper grown, more silent 
and delicate because they too have felt 
that touch of unhindered nature that 
makes of desolation a "delicate thing". 

But It was not In the search of 
Daphne’s ruined groves neither of 
desolation In any form with or without 
a history that I possessed myself of this 
Island to which I have given the name 
"Hesperia." 

Why I should have apparently gone 
so far afield for a name for an Island 
that Is not over far removed from 
the main land Is neither curious nor 
mysterious, neither does It suggest a 
leaning to paganism or a special 
predlledlon for mythological obscurity. 

93 


For a long time I called it "The Island" — 
a name wholly satisfadory to me, but 
when the question began to be repeated 
"What island?" and 1 discovered that 
others claimed to have priority of right 
to that "The" I decided to name my 
island and call it by its name. 

Why Hesperia? The Hesperides 
are not, nor never were here, neither 
Ladon to assid in guarding the apples 
on the bough; but when I was casting 
about for a name I chanced to look up 
into the early morning sky and seeing 
the dar of "the Green Knight" dill 
guarding the passages that lead to 
"Cadies Perilous", I accepted the good 
omen and named my island, Hesperia. 

That it is not specifically charted 
is because I regard it neither a danger 
to be avoided nor a treasure to be 
searched for by the general navigator. 
94 


For dimensions, it has an agreeable 
largeness and is without sharp boundaries 
or precise limitations. For features it 
has hills verging on to the mountains’ 
claims, valleys pidturesque and sociable, 
a lake so small it is only big brother to 
the pond, and one craggy peak 
commanding all these, on which a ruin — 
a beautiful desolation — from whence a 

"Lonely tower, from its thin fringe 
of wood. 

Gives to the parting of the wintry 
moon 

One ha^ty glance, in mocking of 
the night. 

Closing in darkness round it." 

These are the chief features of 
Hesperia and they come about me with 
that familiar closeness which makes of 
nature more than a mere background. 
From the fir^t there was no strangeness 

95 


here but a sense that I had come into 
some aforetime heritage and my thought 
was, the sun of Greece is light, the sun 
of Africa is fire but that of Italy is the 
transfusion of the two, giving that 
delicious opalescence in which all 
dreariness is changed to brightness, all 
verdure reaches out illimitably, all deserts 
are made luminous. In this light, 
strength and energy renew themselves 
and if there be a fierce child-of-Hagar 
within us it grows gentle. 


96 



DELIGHT in beauty but find 
nothing truly beautiful until it 
has warmth and brightness. 
For this reason I make the 
windows in my house unob- 
flruded highways for the sun, 
for the moon and for the dars, 
that the whole interior may be 
given over to these gods of 
light and brightness. There- 
** fore there is no dretch of 
somber wall or ungainly loophole glazed 
with dark colored glass to make a 
travesty of light. Some of these windows 
are deep embrasured but all look with 

97 


frank open eyes out into their own 
particular domain and some of them are 
blessed with such far sight that they take 
splendid range and bring together long 
reaches of country side to which I have 
right and title for the very Inconsiderable 
consideration of having put these windows 
where to command. 

Encouraged by the example of the 
sun the vines ^top not on the threshold 
of the windows but come confidently in 
with their families of blossoms, and 
these, in turn, warrant the bees and 
butterflies and even the smallest of the birds 
coming to share in my windows’ delights. 

These windows it is that have 
broken down the house-walls’ established 
prerogative, that of separating the inside 
from the outside life. When I determined 
to make a federation of the life here, I 
took my windows into my confidence 
98 


and together we plotted and planned 
until we got the upper hand of the walls 
and finally coerced them into coming to 
our support only where and when 
required, and then to be so amiable in 
the ^matter that there would be no 
evidence of their coercion. Thus we 
arrived at the desired result of not having 
nature shut out but on the contrary 
invited to come in at her pleasure. 

Then to carry our free-masonry to 
its ultima thule we put no glass in 
some of these highways and for reward 
we had before the summer was done 
a veritable flower carnival. What 
necromancy will the elimination of 
barriers not make possible! But how 
are flowers and vines and growing things 
to find their way if we shut our doors 
and windows against them and only 
walk and ^alk about, towering five feet 

99 


or more above them in their garden beds? 

Only open a window and ask them 
to come in, to climb up and look you 
full in the eyes and in no long time the 
love ^tory will have spread so entirely 
through their domains that even the 
non-climbers will send seeds on the wind 
and lo, you will see the modest little 
forget-me-not winking with sweet blue 
eyes from some tiny crevice on the sill 
or flopping for a whole summer in a 
quiet comer of a topmost terrace ^tep. 

Once this delightful comaraderie is 
e^ablished between house and garden, 
life in both takes on the delights of 
freedom. Nature’s heart quickly responds 
to her own law and her pulse quickens 
at the removal of obilrudions. If my 
garden was to contribute to my windows’ 
charms, one of my windows had a very 
complimentary contribution to make to 
100 


my garden. A statue of Hermes had 
given its name to this one especial window 
and I had believed that window would 
never surrender it to 2my, but one day 
the garden put in a not-to-be controverted 
claim to the Hermes. The Hermes 
was accorded no voice in the matter, it 
was a que^ion between the garden, the 
window and myself, and the garden won 
me over in the matter. The argument 
was that the window’s loss would be the 
statue’s and the garden’s gain. No 
argument better than that the greatest 
good to the greatest number should be 
granted, and so Hermes went from his 
old familiar lodging out into the 
sunshine, and the flowers bloomed at 
his feet, the vines climbed about him, 
the song birds sung their songs to him 
and to his window he was the center of 
a pidture glowing with warmth emd 


brightness and incomparable beauty. 

Ah, my Hesperia, what kinship 

have we not here where 

I am come with my love to sing to you 

As of old, when the world was 
young. 

When we tended our flocks upon the hills 

And danced a measure to Pan’s 
sweet will 

And drank at Love’s spring to our fill. 

I sung to you then of the wee small 
things 

That builded and burrowed for 
love; 

That love which set grasses and leaves 
to make tune 

With Pan and his reeds at mom 
or at noon. 

With the zephyrs at night, and the moon. 

102 


And I sung to you then of the wind on 
the plain 

That was wayward or listless or 
Sill. 

And you laughed when I sung you the 
' reason why 

It rushed in wild haSe or Sopped 
short to sigh 

Nor believed that it ever would 
die! 


And whatever the theme of the song 
I sung, 

Whatever the tune I chose, 

Our flocks lay down on the hills 
to sleep 

And Pan piped an air both gay 
and deep 

And we danced our dance— as was 
meet. 


103 


And now again I am come to sing — 

As of old, when the world was 
young, 

And ril sing you the song of the wee 
small things. 

Of the wind that baffles, the love 
that clings. 

And of Pan with his music that rings. 


104 


\*i HEIAR the flute-notes of Pan 
as he goes forth to lead his 
own out into the morning. 
The short stemmed flowers 
hover so closely over the 
meadowland that the sun him- 
self knows not how tender is 
the green beneath, and the 
whole islcmd slips from the 
silver-sheened beach to take 
repose on the hillside pastures 
or with unmolested freedom to seek 
noon-day shade among the valley’s 
emerald tangles. 


105 


Sky and sea and next to them in 
Steadfastness the rocks Stand rampart-like 
above, below, around. It is a day’s 
pastime to scale their rugged heights, to 
watch from their vantage ground the 
illimitable sky, to look off over the on- 
moving sea. From these rocks I get a 
view of other islcuids. On one a broken 
fortress wall Stands boldly out along the 
frowning heights over-hanging a ruined 
city. On another a temple wall, on 
which in rhythmic lines the record of its 
fame is Still to be read. But on one 
outdoing all the reSt, Nature herself has 
built a fane to which she’s brought her 
best through centuries of time, and so 
fashioned it forth with grottos, glens, 
mountain caves and shell Strewn shores 
that it alone of all my neighbor islands 
is rival to Hesperia. Looking, it is not 
easy to see why fire and sword and 
106 


earthquake came that island’s way. 
From desolated shrine and altar the 
minor cry goes forth and sad tones they 
are that rise to mingle with the once 
glad hallelujahs. 

"Why," calls a voice, "are our 
altars laid thus desolate? Why these 
sacred places ruthlessly invaded? Why? 
Oh why? Is it that we mu^t with 
tenderer care gather afresh for our 
altars, with deeper voice consecrate to 
loftier service ? Aye, but the mountains 
have fallen and swept from these altars 
our loved gods. From whence the 
strength to uncover these, to lift up our 
beloveds, to restore them to their familiar 
places once again?" 

It is in such que^ioning that the 
human learns his limitations: but learns 
too, how divine is the quality of 
his love. 


107 


"Love bids touch truth, endure truth, 
and embrace 

Truth, though embracing truth. 
Love crush itself. 

Worship not me but God! the angels 
urge: 

That is love’s grandeur." 

Love’s grandeur! A thing not to 
be symbolized by anything of earth 
unless it be the sea — the mysterious and 
resplendent sea. There it lies truly 
resplendent under the sky’s deep 
sapphire, mysterious in its out-reach to 
that far line, where (as we surely 
believe) the mariner will find his 
appointed deStiny. The mind and spirit 
are not separated in the long voyage out 
to the sea’s far line and thus heaven and 
earth go hand in hand. Sea and sky 
meet, mind and spirit together pass the 
meeting line and thus earth and heaven 
108 


go hand in hand. Anticipation is eager, 
and if a heart knows itself capable of 
winning love from earth’s fellows may it 
not believe it draws to it in full beSowal 
God’s love ? This is consummate destiny ! 
To think these thoughts, to believe in 
the truth of them, is to hear the flute- 
notes of Pan, is to read the name 
ERASMA 

that inscribed is on every shrine and 
altar, temple, and fane, "Everything 
desirable" — "The one beloved" — a name 
Nature would not engrave upon her 
work if it was not a true name. 
"Erasma!" The sound of the name 
touches the chord of feeling and satisfies 
the mind. To let its sound vibrate 
through the human is to give fresh life 
to ideas, to deepen feeling, to send an 
appeal to the inner sanduary and there 
to kindle the needed Promethean fire. 

109 


In the light and warmth of this fire the 
simplest scenes of nature hold a charm 
more forcible them art’s be^t, emd by 
contract makes art a thing fabricated not 
created, and on whose brow we may 
not write "Erasma". 


110 



(•i LEANED on the turf, 

I looked at a rock 
Left dry by the surf—" and saw 
how lovely is the sea wheeling 
p s* its waters in long beauty curves 
to the bays and inlets of my 
island’s wooded shores. Out 
toward the far horizon, there 
stretches that eternity, — indefin- 
ite, glorious in its unrevealed 
^ infinity, holding secure all the 
secrets God confides to it. 

Out there that; near by a 
necromancy carried on by wind and 
trees. With the waving of the boughs 

III 


about it, there is revealed the keystone 
of an old Greek arch, and beneath it, 
wrapped round with vines, a marble 
figure of Flora. The wind and the 
boughs teach me how soft and flexible 
even marble may become making this 
Flora seem to turn a likening ear, seem 
to give a responsive heart throb and 
let fall the flowers from her hands 
into mine. 

Aye, what necromancers are the 
wind and the trees that this goddess 
should, like Galatea, hear the pleadings 
of love and be not only willing but glad 
to feel the warmth of life in her veins! 
How else though on a mid-summer day 
like this when the sun is supreme, 
finishing on the bough as in the soil the 
miracle of creation ? Bringing all 
promise to 

”perfedion, no more and no less 


112 


In the kind I imagined, full fronts me; 
and God is seen God 
In the ^ar, in the ^one, in the flesh, 
in the soul, in the clod.” 

The mystic movements of the wind 
make flexible and soft the old arch that 
canopies the Flora and the beauty with 
which her ma^er endowed her spreads 
like a miracle round about her and falls 
together with the sunlight in golden 
circles upon the ground. 

Oh Phidias and Pan what immor- 
tality is yours! You have filled the 
earth with Beauty and Harmony, — a 
beauty that blushes as she rises morning 
by morning fresh from her couch of 
immortal youth, a harmony that attunes 
itself night by night to the music of 
the spheres! The one of you has 
cry^talized love and fixed it, the other 
transfused it through the air. Is there 

113 


a greater miracle than this? and all 
the secret is that each recognized 
himself 

"A God though in the germ." 


114 


IpHEN you Eind I are 
' : blown by the wind 
of circumSance under 
different skies, it is true 
that we do not change 
our minds, but it is also 
true that every feature 
of life is changed. If 
you go where the blue 
waves wear the features 
of green boughs, where 
the soft breezes those of cool winds you 
are under the influences of the North- 
land, its pines and beeches, the while I 
linger in the land of the olive, the sea 

115 


and its breezes. Influences ! But, c a r o 
maestro, a oneness with nature lessens 
di^ance and separation. But how trite 
all this is; an old string o’ the harp 
constantly thrummed upon. It is easy 
enough to feel how we are of the great 
brotherhood of nature, are under one 
common law in and with her; easy 
enough to feel our kinship to her leaves 
and flowers, to her soft murmuring seas 
and shimmering silver Stars, yes, even to 
feel kinship to her fierce volcanos and 
her majestic golden sun; — and some say 
it is enough. Say it is better to feel 
kinship to these, better to seek and 
accept as sufficient the full, fresh 
influences of these than any other. 
Possibly. But, tell me, do even these 
greatest of nature’s forces really come 
so near that they still ”the passion and 
the pain,” the "inarticulate cry" of the 
116 


heart? Does the near kinship with the 
leaves and the flowers, with seas and 
sun and itars satisfy this? There are 
ears that hear the whispers of the waves 
above their roar, hear the sigh of the 
winds above their wildest sweep, and do 
they not hear the pulsations, the silences 
of the heart above the noise of speech? 

Knowing the answer, why philos- 
ophize? Surely it is a Spring wind 
that blows two souls together over the 
border-land of Birth and if in the early 
dawn they wander apart, theirs would 
have to be a longing something less than 
the soul’s to be satisfied with the 
companionship of nature alone. 

"The mystic highways, spirit-built, — 
Nerves of flesh for sovereign mind. 
Run to all kingdoms as thou wilt, 
Rome-like, royal, unconfined. 


117 


Art thou a Roman? Converse hold 
With all that is, or new or old, 
Thine the Empire. Thine the Throne, 
Fare thou forth! Assume thine 
own!” 

Here, buono maestro, is a 
definition of life’s meaning; a ” royal 
unconfined” meaning of its truth, the 
power to diredt the forces that lie 
within, the ” nerves of flesh” within 
the sovereign mind”, and that lie along 
the ” spirit-built” highways leading out 
”to all kingdoms”. The kingdom of 
Nature is only one of the kingdoms 
wherein mountains sometimes wear a 
purple in^ead of a green profile, where 
islands spring unheralded from a quiet 
sea, where cliff and rock and tortuous 
water-ways appear among the meadows 
to toss the daisies into white billows. 


118 


What a new and freshened sense of 
being this phenomena must bring to the 
life of Nature’s world. Why fear we? 
What dead sea fruit would be washed 
along the shores did these really glorious 
transformations not come. 

But to-day there is calm among the 
green life about, all is in the summer of 
beauty, and the sea was never bluer or 
washed the steps of the garden with 
greater gentleness and yet, — and yet — 
I hear! There is a "passion and the 
pain" of an "inarticulate cry" hereabouts. 

It must have been from hereabouts 
that one wrote, 

"The period of life is brief, 

’Tis the red of the red rose leaf, 
’Tis the gold of the sunset sky, 

’Tis the flight of a bird on high" — 
but hear how the song goes on, — breaks 
into the "twice told tale," 


119 


" But you fill its space 

With such an infinite grace 
That the red will tinge all time 

And the gold through the ages shine 
And the bird fly swift and straight 

To the portal of God’s own gate." 


120 


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YTHOLOGY has a way 
of keeping the life of the 
world young. Age it knows 
not and youth and beauty 
it brings with the dew’s 
freshness on them to our 
gardens everyday. It is only 
this morning that it came 
into my little gallery and 
pointed out to me the 
exceeding beauty of a 
pidure, that there hangs of Orpheus and 
Eurydice. The artid, too, has added a 
didindt charm to this pidure in that he 
departs from the more familiar ideas of 

121 


this subjed and therein his genius and 
my intered. He has evidently conceived 
a second and successful trial had been 
granted Orpheus and that so far from 
the disobedience of looking back he is 
looking straight and unflinchingly ahead, 
his courage strengthened by a feeling of 
security which is not however evidenced 
in the sense of sight but in that 
of touch, — 

— "Through all parts diffused. 
That it might look at will through 
every pore." 

The possession is thus made sure 
of, and the eye is left free to guide the 
perilous Steps of both. Into the eyes of 
Orpheus the artist has clearly depided 
a consciousness of danger, yet he faces 
it with Steady, dauntless courage. That 
look is the centerpoint of the whole 
representation; its calm intensity is made 
122 


to give firmness to the foot, and a 
muscular tension to the arm that bears 
the lyre. The other arm tenderly bends 
to its burden. The whole frame 
betokens effort, except where lies the 
precious weight and there it is as if the 
contadl relaxed all unneeded ^rain, — a 
very delicate conception, and the single 
evidence of tenderness on the bard’s 
part. This, together with the total 
absence from the resolute face of every 
trait of evil triumph, lifts the pidure out 
of the class ordinary and makes it as 
fine poetically as it is representative 
of true art. 

In Eurydice there is in her whole 
mien an abandon of trust, made visible 
in the position of the arms which are in 
drong contrad to the energy apparent 
in Orpheus. Altogether passive, her 
feet alone relieving him of her weight, 

123 


she re^ls in something like half- 
consciousness in his embrace. Does 
this semi-conscious ^tate come from the 
terror at the sights around, or from the 
weariness of the ascent? If the fir^t, it 
would be more natural for the head to 
fall forward seeking shelter, as would a 
child, but the head being thrown back 
indicates that the artist chose to portray 
fatigue which position gives to the figure 
those classic lines necessary to the Greek 
dress with which her form is so simply, 
so my^eriously draped, cuid which though 
part of yet lends a separate charm. 
Then the quietness, the calm of it all is 
like to statuary, telling its ^lory without 
the lea^t exaggeration and giving me to 
feel the charm of friendship toward these 
two, to hold converse with them both. 
Maybe this comes because I feel the 
worth of the allegory for it has its 
124 


individual worth, quite apart from any 
ariti^tic merit the artist has here conferred 
upon it. But the pidure is in^tindl with 
life and is a superb interpretation of the 
answer Orpheus gave to that wild, 
pathetic cry of Eurydice from out the 
unterwelt. He heard that, 

"Give them me, the mouth, the eyes, 
the brow! 

Let them once more absorb me! 
One look now 

Will lap me round forever, not to pass 
Out of its light, though darkness 
lie beyond: 

Hold me but safe again within the bond 
Of one immortal look! All woe 
that was. 

Forgotten, and all terror that may be. 
Defied, — no pa^l is mine, no future ; 
look at me! 

* * * * 


125 


Silently this artist painted his 
Orpheus and silently I consider how 
without canvas, brush or colors I may 
portray an Orpheus that will come as 
near to fulfilling the conception that I hold 
in my mind and as worthy that conception 
as is this Orpheus of Berschlag. 

On an island againS the shores of 
which the current of distradions runs 
less swift than againd some, and where 
the light of the great "Green-dar" falls 
with no indiredness, on such am island a 
true portrait ought to be painted. If 
then it be less than true it will prove 
that there are indeed originals of which 
no absolutely true copy can be made, 
that is, made in prose. 

It is different when a poet poses 
his subjed for he being a true artid 
there is no quality of mind or heart 
that is not by his tender and passionate 
126 


handling easily portrayed as well as every 
conquer in the world’s arena: imagina- 
tion, hope and faith throwing their triune 
light upon achievement and la^ly bringing 
these under the felicitous bondage of the 
spirit and its own high supremacy. 

When the great Angelo saw these 
things in the heart of the ^one he 
recognized what a goodly brotherhood 
they were to be made. To come forth 
singly, one by one, and take each his 
place in the human citadel of ^rength. 
With each quality in possession of its 
own, exercising with energy the full 
life of it, under-development nowhere, 
there would ^tand forth the "tenth 
man" — perfed, a man among men! — 
This Angelo knew, and knew if he 
was worthy the title maestro this 
man must emerge, must stand forth 
bearing upon the surface the qualities that 

127 


have their source deep in the heart. 
How differently would have fared with 
that ^tone had the intelligence and will 
of the maestro been badly trained, 
or had been enslaved to hand-tasks 
denying the mastery to the gifted spirit. 

But a clear, keen intelled was a 
ruling power with Angelo and to it he 
gave large place of honor. A man thus 
endowed, may not realize his vidories. 
He will go forth to sanguinary fields of 
battle and leave them with the same 
calmness with which a simple duty is 
discharged. The effed is manifed, but 
the source ? From whence this poise that 
allows the mind to pass with surprising 
vigor and power back and forth between 
field and fold; no disappointment, no 
fatigue, but with an evenness that looks like 
mydery to the unpoised world? Some 
Angelo shall do this other Orpheus! 

128 



IVE but the scent of violets 
Beneath a dream-set 
sky, 

And down a little wind- 


ing way 

Go Memory and I." 
It reconciles many a 
confliding thought to be- 
lieve that it is because of 
memory, — dim it may be 
but true,— that the entire term of the 
soul’s existence here is required to 
reconcile it to its changed conditions. If 
these conditions should to memory be 
harmonious it is easy to understand how 

129 


there is less disturbance in the realm of 
the soul and consequently a greater 
degree of the thing we call contentment, 
and this being so, the hoped-for in a 
previous existence would be measurably 
fulfilled here. But, if the conditions 
should be less harmonious, the whole 
environment at variance not only with 
the remembrances of the soul but with 
its every quality, is it strange there should 
be so much of the "infinite longing" 
which no superficial fortune satisfies ? 

On whatever modicum of truth this 
belief may rest, on the same must rest 
the belief that the soul receives its 
rewards, its punishments while in transit, 
which in the "great day" will insure its 
entering-in to its final inheritance of 
perfedion not as a culprit begging for 
mercy but as an heir worthy, and bearing 
the full likeness of the God head ! 

130 


If this seems a daring belief, turn 
away from the disturbance of hopes 
unfilled to the calm of — shall we say — 
the soul’s memories ? Their truth seems 
to grow clearer in communion with the 
thought, until there seems to be revealed 
a cause for much of our earthy unrest. 
At first the human mind must be infidel 
to such belief because it is trained to 
believe that happiness is a state consigned 
to an uncertain future; somewhere 
in the soul’s life to be found, some far 
where. Faith sometimes grows weary 
of its long flight and falls unwinged. 
But what if the mind finds in memory 
familiar lands on which the past and the 
future meet and give a present free from 
illusions? secure in the knowledge that, 
”Ages past the soul existed. 

Here an age ’tis resting merely. 
And hence, fleets again for ages; 


131 


While the true end, sole and single. 
It ftops here for is, this love-way. 

Else it loses what it lived for. 

And eternally mult lose it; 

Better ends may be in prospedt. 
Deeper blisses if you choose it. 

But this life’s end and this love-bliss 
Have been lo^t here—" 

On a night like this thoughts run 
out with the tides of the sea and come 
again to roll back and forth upon their 
old familiar beach. The wind is ever 
trying to drive back threatening clouds, 
to set free the flame-colored sky or to 
show that beyond there is an infinite 
blue where all thoughts become 
argenta-bianco, overspreading life 
with a divine harmony. There is also 
an endless sweep of celestial ocecui, blue, 
Star filled, serene. Everywhere life is 
132 


united to life, a marvelous entity that 
awakens by its own forceful harmony 
the love as well as the power of thought. 
The sights vouched safe to the external 
eye quicken the internal vision until the 
universe that is brought into the inner 
world is incomparably more beautiful 
than the azure deeps of this celeSial 
ocean, full-swimming as it is with starry 
constellations. 

Near and far I look into the bound- 
less reaches of nature and everywhere 
see and feel the closeness of the fraternity 
existing among her forces, the spirit is 
indwelling, its power diffused. And 
where, I ask, is man? Is he isolated? 
The only force left by nature to work 
out his own salvation alone? Nature 
may not be demonstrative, may not 
answer her children’s questions when 
and as they would have her, but she is 

133 


nevertheless their good and sagacious 
mother making good her laws to them, 
as to other forms of less conscious life. 
Therefore it is that there is on a night 
like this, with a truth revealed like this, 
no fear or far,— distance is annihilated 
and the stars become sisters. The spirit 
and the brain have coalesced until through 
the illumined mind all the starry hosts 
of heaven pass in near review. No 
longer is there strangeness, from hence- 
forth we are children of one mother 
living in our glorious world under no 
bonds but those of hers. 

Hesperus surely never looked more 
surpassingly beautiful than to-night. Is 
it because the eye’s vision, the ear’s 
hearing, the mind’s comprehension have 
been quickened, roused from dullness by 
the revelation of a truth ? Do intuition 
and inspiration come, the one from the 
134 


deeps of a consciousness that holds its 
knowledge from God, the other from a 
sunlight, that pervades every part of the 
universe? And is there between these 
consummated that divine union that 
gives the eye to see what the eye hath 
not seen before, the ear to hear what 
the ear hath not heard before, and to 
make enter into the heart of man what 
has never entered before? If so the 
realm is gained in which man sees and 
hears "the things which God hath 
prepared for them that love him." 

The night goes radiantly on and 
with no clouds intervening what an 
expanse of sky, star-set, limitless, reaches 
from glory to gloiy until there is needed 
neither the light of the sun neither of 
the stars for "the Lord God Almighty 
is the light thereof !" "The Spirit saith 
Come" and there is but to follow 


135 


while "Still the eloquent air breathes". 

To go into the light of the "green 
^tar" has become an easy and dearly 
familiar way of entering into those realms 
of imagination which are also the realms 
of the ideal and in which, through the 
medium of contemplation, it is also easy 
to realize that "the Lord God Almighty 
is", indeed, "the light thereof." 

On a night like this the astronomers’ 
knowledge pales, fades away. Science 
recognizes the phenomena it yet has not 
sufficient insight into the things of the spirit 
to see. The pathways it has marked out 
through Starland need not Stop at the 
confines of mechanical and mental insight. 

All the work of all the yesterdays 
has led to a realism which was as much 
an idealism of the yesterdays as any 
idealism of to-day will be the realism 
of to-morrow. 


136 


The intuitive yearning of every 
healthful soul to give expression to the 
things of the spirit has come near to the 
surface of life and has become so revive 
under the reSridions of Science as to 
make it apparent that a wholly material 
interpretation of natural phenomena is 
inadequate. What then? Is it dreaming 
an idealidic dream to believe that the 
minds of searchers are to be quickened, 
that the great light is to fall in which 
will be revealed a fullness of knowledge, 
the ideal thing we now search for, and 
find it in the realms of an intelligent 
imagination and contemplation? 

The Star-Land-way is near by to 
him who breaking the bonds of an 
unreasonable reason takes his way 
through the infinite into infinitudes. 
The beauties of the way are great, the 
lifting up supreme. The earthly tents 

137 


lose none of their beauty neither the 
glades in which they are sequestered; 
the sea washes the shore with the same 
caress and into the deepest foreSts the 
wind goes with his message "yea and 
amen forever." 

In no part of this flight into the 
infinite do we lose sight of our material 
world. We see it’s temples, — see how, 
these temples of our body builded by 
God, are fit temples for the Spirit. 

Through an atmosphere radiant 
and glorious the Stars lead us on to a 
day magnificent with possibilities; a day of 
spiritualized materialism through which 
we no longer grope about in the dim 
light of partial knowledge, unsatisfied, 
homesick, heartsick. 

Yes sweetheart, the journey is centuries 
long. 


138 


But we shall come back come back: 

And when we are come we will sing 
earth’s song 

Which, singing together will not 
seem long, 

And its music no sweetness will lack. 

For sweetheart, the song will be of the 
climb, — 

When we have come back come 
back: — 

Where the roughest it was and where 
it was fine 

Where the gray olive shaded or 
rich purpling vine. 

Or avalanche swept way life’s track. 

And sweetheart, our song will be of 
the time, — 

When we have come back, come 
back: — 


139 


When ilorm cind tempest sung songs 
sublime, 

Or life and love were in sweetest 
rhyme 

With faith and hope empack’d. 


HO 



sHY is it when all the 
i soul’s faculties and 
energies reduce them- 
selves to a single impulse 
that the expression mo^t 
natural to give under 
this masterful influence, 
is given to some dumb 
creature? — the sympa- 
thy most natural to crave 
that unspoken by some 
Come Leo, I would bury 
my fingers in your soft fur and see deep 
down in your eyes the underStcmding you 
possess. Is it, Leo, based on the truer 
thing than human intelligence? Is it? 

141 


dumb friend? 


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OW and again men 
have experiences that 
are near enough to the 
pleasant things that occur 
in dreamland to make them 
wonder if they are dream- 
ing. To-day the wind is 
ever5where and in every 
mood. From the North it 
comes in long, hurrying 
half fierce sweeps, from 
the South with buoyancy but forceless, 
from the and We^t in gu^ty puffs 
and swirls. We would watch all this 
from the Villa’s windows on Naples 

143 


bay, here, it would be curious if I did 
not go out into it. Thought drifts or 
rather runs before it, shelters itself from 
it, plays on the edges of it. 

The North wind brings a Story of 
the Ardic,— "O Ardic night, thou art 
like a woman, a marvelously lovely 
woman. Thine are the noble, pure 
outlines of antique beauty, with its marble 
coldness. On thy high, smooth brow, 
clear with the clearness of ether, is no 
compassion for the little sufferings of 
despised humanity; on thy pale, beautiful 
cheek no blush of feeling. Among thy 
raven locks, waving out into space, the 
hoar froSt has sprinkled its glittering 
crystals. The proud lines of thy throat, 
thy shoulders’ curves are as noble, but, 
oh! unspeakably cold; thy bosom’s white 
chastity is feelingless as the snowy ice. 
Chaste, beautiful and proud, thou floateSt 
144 


through ether over the frozen sea, thy 
glittering garment, woven of aurora 
beams, covering the vault of heaven. 
But sometimes I divine a twitch of pain 
on thy lips, and endless sadness dreams 
in thy dark eyes. Oh how tired I am 
of thy cold beauty ! 1 long to return to 

life. Let me get home again, as 
conqueror or as beggar, what does 
that matter? But let me get home 
to begin life anew. The years are 
passing here, and what do they bring? 
Nothing but du^, dry duft, which the 
fir^ wind blows away; new duS comes 
in its place, and the next wind takes 
it too. T ruth ? Why should we always 
make so much of truth? Life is more 

than cold truth, and we live but once.” 

* * * * 

"This snowless ice-plain is like a 
life without love — nothing to soften it. 

145 


The marks of all the battles and the 
hummocks of ice 5land forth juft as when 
they were made, rugged and difficult to 
move among. Love is life’s snow. It 
falls on the paft to soften into the gashes 
left by the fight — whiter and purer than 
snow itself. What is life without love? 
It is like this ice — a cold, bare, rugged 
mass, the wind driving it and rending it 
and then forcing it together again, 
nothing to cover over the open rifts, 
nothing to round away the sharp comers 
of the broken floes — nothing, nothing but 
bare, rugged drift ice.” 

The South wind calls to my 
Hesperia, ”Oh, beautiful and limitless 
land, keep the soft mifts about thee! 
The children of knowledge and experi- 
ence never tire of turning to such as 
thee, slipping within the folds of thy 
mifts for comfort and repose!” 

146 


From the We^, from the Ea^, there are 
Curious gu^s that sweep over the 
plain, 

They catch up the du^ 

And they bring down the rain, 
They lay the grain low 
Beyond power to mow 
They break down the trees 
And they drown all the bees. 
Yet they’re only queer gu^s on the plain. 

These are the winds that give 
significance to the peculiar thing that a 
” miscellaneous” day is, and since early 
morning all these winds have in turn 
been blowing, have had the day at their 
mercy and have brought to my feet a 
miscellaneous lot of leaves. If these 
scurry into some half sheltered recess it 
is only to be whisked out and off again. 
Some of these leaves bear messages to 

147 


me. On one, written from the Villa’s 
garden, is a pathetic as well as 
symboli^ic ^tory of a sensitive plant 
there. In reading it I consider how, 
under the delicate enamel that the 
world compels such natures to put about 
them there goes on the same shrinking, 
the same folding closer, as with that 
exquisite plant, but with the human there 
is added a wide-eyed wonder at the rude 
hand’s familiar touch. Possibly it is the 
sharp eye of curiosity that seeks to 
penetrate and give the dreaded touch. 
This dread of the uncongenial abides in 
sensitive natures not from a super- 
fastidiousness, or indeed from fastidious- 
ness in any of its commonly accepted 
meanings, since these are they who 
shrink not from service but perform it 
with a gentle and Strong composure 
where the banner of Love and D u t y is 
148 


unfurled. Ah, I am making a long range 
application from a short range knowledge. 

On one leaf I read a poem and on 
another find a sober bit of reasoning on 
a subjedt we like be^t without sober 
reasoning. A philosopher begins with 
an epigram not likely to be controverted — 
"There are more things in the world 
than are dreamt of by philosophy. Any 
delightful vision refreshes and invigorates 
the heart of a man, and seeing such a 
vision renews life!" And then he goes 
on to say that this is not the way he 
would make record of that sight to his 
eyes that renewal of life to his heart. 
He would not philosophize or fill his 
brain with abitrad ideas, neither would 
he philosophize when through the 
remaining hours of the day he thought 
of that vision as a poet, as a lover, not 
as a philosopher. 


149 


The world is not supposed to 
believe in visions and yet every man 
sooner or later sees some one vision that 
he believes in. Is it curious? But the 
plaint of this man leads me to believe 
he did not carry away that something 
potent, which had touched the central 
figure of his vision. A rose, a leaf, 
anything that would carry with it the 
traditional charm. Countless of the 
heart-wounded have gone about wearing 
an air of content and of attainment all 
because they were wearing some 
such amulet. 

That he did not possess himself of 
this thing seemingly so necessary to his 
peace, turned him into old familiar paths 
of discovery without avail. Is it because 
a man is philosopher and not a lover in 
his methods, that he sometimes fails to 
secure this little something that would 
150 


be the greater benefadion to him? 

Another question,— mud a man 
cease to be a philosopher if he is to be 
a lover? 

A belief there is that philosophy 
would be a safe-guard in the matter of 
love, but why do we consider it needful 
to safe-guard againd anything so 
essentially good as love? 

Curious! And curious too that 
we feel the lack of possession of this all- 
potent charm, this precious nothing that 
we value because of its nothingness! 
Certainly we are punished if we have 
been in the habit of seeing men delight 
in these value-enhanced articles without 
either an emotion of sympathy or of 
envy; and now ask what are lands, 
learning, edate or riches of any sort 
compared to the proof, some little token 
gives the while it bears about with it 

151 


the hope bom of the vision seen ? 

These thoughts and sentiments reach 
beyond the confines of philosophy. A 
vision not of sleep but of wide open eyes 
leads a man to quench his thirS at an- 
other kind of spring: to turn away, to 
relinquish philosophy’s cup, no wish to 
abate any of the sentiments in which he 
holds his vision, but to allow the faculties 
of the mind to obey the mandates 
of the soul. 

If one thought out of the old 
philosophy obtrudes itself — to love thus 
means sorrow — love mu^ answer; were 
it revealed that in a week of time this 
vision would pass wholly beyond sight, 
go beyond the reach of this life, so 
conscious would we be of what it has 
given so fully would that gift remain that 
we would realize the real sorrow of a 
life had not been to have seen a vision 


152 


and lo^t it, but not to have seen it. 
Once possessed, sorrow is less sorrow 
however the vision pass. Do I mean 
by this that the sight of the eyes, the 
sound of the voice is nothing? Far 
from it. Their nearness is the very 
fullness of joy, and yet the real sorrow 
to any life is not their passing out but 
had they never passed in. 

Dante beheld a vision and left 
record of the truth ! 

Oh philosopher and the lover within 
thee, you are indeed at the goal when 
completion is yours, but are you not in 
dreamland ? 

” — he slept, but was aware he slept. 
As who brain-sick made pad 

Erd with the overhanging catarad 
To deafen him, yet dill didinguished slow 
His own blood’s measured clicking 
at his brow.” 


153 











rHE summer-time song is on 
our lips. We only vary its 
cadence to suit the shifting 
moods of the forex’s shade 
or the meadow’s sunlight, but 
it is ever and always the dear 
old summer-time song. One 
day it is of life, one day it is 
of love. Wherein do these 
differ? Alike they emphasize 
Life with greater force. 
Love with deeper tenderness. Alike 
they sing the song of the flower on its 
mountain’s side, the song of the light on 
the cre^l of the breaking wave, the song 

155 


of the shade creeping from the forex’s 
threatening gloom, the song of the fern 
softening the rock’s barren face. During 
la^ night the roses have, like the pink 
hawthome in the earlier spring, showered 
the ground with their bright pink leaves, 
transforming the quiet coolness of the 
green into a warmer beauty, and being 
my own gardener in Hesperia this 
warmer beauty is not lo^ to the lawn 
by a professional gardener’s ideas of 
neatness. Beauty and ideality are here 
unmole^ed, and seeing what a perfedl 
real they make, it is revealed to me how 
no expression of nature is separate or 
separable in the divine principle of life. 
In that principle all things are a unit and 
correlated in spirit; and to recognize this 
is also to recognize how the human mind 
may be sublimed,— brought into relation- 
ship with the things of the spirit and so 


156 


establish that fullness of fellowship in 
the individual life that as the eye sees 
and delights in the beauty and ideality 
of externals, so through the eye of the 
spirit will the mind see how these are 
united in the divine principle, are in 
themselves the principle, the only real. 

To see this is to see the kind of 
a vision that sublimes mind, not creates 
a visionary mind, and imagination lends 
a hand only so far as it throws open the 
doors of light. Suppose imagination 
helps me to see the realms of beauty 
and ideality that are round about the 
ilar Hesperus — that "Green Knight "-of- 
the-sky whose name is a significant part 
of the beauty and ideality here abouts — 
would it contribute more toward my 
mind’s subliming than this vision of 
rose-leaf beauty come through the 
medium of the eye? We talk of the 

157 


higher, the lower, the nearer, the 
farther, but there are no gradations, no 
distances in the realms of the spirit 
neither in the human mind once it has 
entered into the true relationship. 

It is hardly true that this relationship 
is discovered through the help of externals 
and imagination only, nor do we ever 
seriously believe it is, since deny it as 
we will, we know that the mind never 
attains to this sublime ^tate except 
through the light shed upon it by faith. 
No man is unconscious of the intuition 
of faith and mo^ men follow its leading 
more diredtly than they realize even 
while they are bewildering themselves 
in the realms of reason, reading the signs 
awrong, wearying over speculation, 
suspicious of the white light of truth 
because it shines through the medium of 
faith. And this is only one of the 
158 


countless ways leading to the cattles 
Perilous and it is not strange the mind 
that is heedless of the "Green Knight’s" 
guardianship wanders away into an 
unmapped country, but surely it is a 
grievous thing to lose through this one 
life’s span, that true relationship to which 
body, mind and soul are ordained. 

Who doubts that our true deftiny 
waits at the door of a true intelligence? 
The wonder is that the glory does not 
shine through and radiate the darkness 
this side it. 

What say the awakened? That 
the world is not beautiful to the sleeper, 
neither do the blind see the thing life 
is. The unawakened dream of rhyme 
and harmony, feel the pleasing lull of 
the dream but they do not hear how 
these are poetry and music in the soul, 
neither know how glorious is the measure 

159 


of harmony revealed through the Spirit, 
nor how vital is this harmony to the 
true relationship. 

The beneficence that comes of 
making one’s home on an island such 
as Hesperia is a matter of constant 
satisfadion since nature is neither dumb 
nor evasive of truth, and it would indeed 
be a dull ear that heard not, and a 
closed mind that saw not. To discredit 
the openness of her speech would be to 
proclaim our deafness, to accuse her of 
evasion, to proclaim an unawakened mind. 

Therefore every phase of living in 
Hesperia is possessed of charms peculiarly 
its own. If these are gray in tone it 
does not follow that they are to be 
merged into a rayless black. Silver is 
with gray polarized and these are not 
inimical to sorrow, neither do they shut 
off the true and natural light belonging 
160 


thereto. Sorrow would turn toward us 
a more benign countenance did we not 
shroud her in that blackness of darkness 
that reigns outside the domains of the 
Spirit. What a grievous sin is this we 
suffer while all the time the ^tars of our 
destiny are shining with a silver-gray light ! 

To make no mistakes then, to feel 
no confusions in entering into new king- 
doms or in shifting the scenery of the 
old, the mind mu^l be as superior as is 
the soul to the conditions of the new; as 
harmonious as is the soul with the laws 
that are based on the everlasting, never 
changing principle divine. 

How infinitely simpler to nature’s 
intelligence is this thing we call divine- 
principle. Without questioning, without 
seeking she ads upon it. Without 
seeking, without questioning the roses in 
my garden bloomed and now without 

161 


que^lioning the leaves shower down 
making another form of beauty. Because 
of the changed form is the rose 
less, 

The rose— the beautiful rose ! 

The fairest form that my garden 
grows? 

The dew pearls bright her love- 
deep cup 

And honey bees come their fill 
to sup: 

She opens her heart to the warm, 
sweet rain. 

And when it is done there’s left no 
^ain: 

She veils not her face when the 
sun draws nigh 

But lets his warm kisses her soft 
cheeks dye; 

Nor do her eyes close to the wondrous 
light 


162 


Of the ^tars, that shine through every 
night: 

For she is a queen — this beautiful 
rose, 

A queen by right of the crown she 
shows. 


163 








■ ITH many an environ- 
i ment there is reason to 
be on guard but when 
in obedience to law an 
environment is sought 
and found harmonious 
to the law, why fear to 
be at the mercy of it? 
Doubtless all environ- 
ments play upon mind 
and feeling, have power 
to create, to elevate, to depress and to 
make it easy for nothing better than 
emotion to vibrate between them, and 
therefore it is wisdom to choose wisely, 

165 


discreetly, unless it be a matter of 
indifference, or war be as congenial as 
peace. I think, mio maestro, likes 
to te^l me, to put me on the witness 
^tand when he asks me if it is good for 
man to choose an environment that 
ensures peace? Is not life meant to be 
a warfare? Is not reS for him who 
has fought the fight, not dropped out of 
the ranks before the end? I answer 
possibly — probably, yet it is agreed that 
good generalship means the fight to be 
from vantage ground. The taking 
possession of such ground means not 
capitulation, the laying down of arms, 
but the chance to wage a more successful 
warfare, to use the forces at command 
with that true economy which insures 
a reserve at command. It is for this 
that vantage ground is sought and when 
found occupied. That men die hopeless 
166 


in this search is alas all too true. 
Why? — Ah, maestro, there is a 
question for you to answer. Hereabouts 
the answer is written on all the green 
ramparts of nature. 

Obedience ! Obedience ! is the 
clarion note of every leaf that bursts 
its bondage and flutters freely into life. 
Obedience! Obedience! is as sweetly 
voiced by every flower come up through 
root and stem to where it flings its gloiy 
free! All nature joins, the symphony 
rolls on; from mountain top from sea all 
free; free because obedient to law. Is 
there no precept or example in this? 
No proof that man through obedience 
has not the right to share in this universal 
freedom amd granted specifically, under 
the law, to each seeker? 

Men would not die hopeless did 
they li^en to these clarion notes sounded 

167 


so unmistakably to every child of nature. 
In them is not promise but proof of 
fulfillment. To be under the law is not 
bondage, to be disobedient is to lose the 
freedom it insures. 

All men are seekers, no man 
escapes the throe of the Struggle, why 
then miss the goal? Is the warfare of 
the ages too Strenuous? The route of 
march too circuitous? There are sharp 
turns in the road that any man may take 
advantage of; there are glimpses to be 
had through nature’s green walls 
everywhere along the route. There is 
only to look, to listen, to break away 
and take possession of some individual 
piece of vantage ground, some Hesperia 
that is washed by the waves of an 
infinite sea. All seas look infinite with 
their shoreless Stretch of living green 
waves carrying the eye easily over, and 
168 


the imagination easily out and beyond the 
sky line’s demarkation, and this infinity 
may be as real as it looks. It is the fir^l 
day of a new year to any seeker that day 
on which he breaks away from the rank 
and file and from his own vantage ground 
looks out upon an infinite sea. 

How comes it that with so many 
weary marchers there is only here or 
there one who breaks the ranks and finds 
his own Hesperia? — and stands at the 
sea’s edge alone? Does this one feel 
alone? Loneliness would be a new 
sensation to any child of nature; and 
every man is a child of nature once he 
has felt the close ties that bind him to 
her, felt the beneficence of that law 
which makes him free. 

Out in the open, landing on the 
shores of the emerald sea, he can ^llll 
discern the gray outlines of a country 

169 


dotted thickly with great temples and 
halls of learning, and ^till can recognize 
the seekers going in and out. Some are 
teachers, some are learners. Which is 
which ? Perhaps his remove is now too 
far to tell — perhaps. At all events it 
seems to mean nothing to any but himself, 
to him it means all. What teach they 
in those great halls? What learn they? 
"Heaven is within a man"? So he had 
heard it whispered there. Did any man 
give evidence of that truth? Ambition 
and learning and fame were everywhere 
Inscribed upon the walls, everywhere 
the slogan of the eager ho^s. How 
many hear? 

Once and again it is heard, and 
then, oh the fathoms deep of the soul’s 
sensations ! 

Easy quite to see the glory of the laurel- 
crowned who pass 


170 


With sound of trumpet, blaze of banners, 
through the thronging mass. 

But where the sight to pierce the 
flesh-mesh 

Look within the soul, and see the 
rapture in the coming 
Of God’s servant to the goal? 

Whispered low he hears the ^tory of a 
heaven within. 

All its glories all its triumphs, these 
are his to win. 


171 









AN ought to inscribe the 
Greek word Zanthos on 
the banner that he floats over 
the cattle of his love. This 
might insure his being so 
jealous in the care 
of — not jealous of — the 
objed of his love, that his 
love taking on the godly 
quality of protedion, he 
could neither cease to love 
nor change its evidences to a species of 
patronage; and so give beautiful evidence 
that that which it proteds; a truth to be 
ratified by man if he would edablish his 

173 


right to the title of protedor and give 
evidence that sentiments within him are 
not masquerading in some domino and 
making a poor travedy in the royal 
robes of Love. To inscribe a man’s 
banner with the word Zanthos, is 
also to gather up its color significance — 
jealousy — and so not deprive it of the 
glory the Greeks conferred when they 
used it as an epithet for the sun, for fire, 
for wax, for honey, these things of 
the golden hue. 

If I were to devise an insignia for 
what I call, "The Order of the Circling 
Days" it would be a dar set with 
brilliants, ruby center, and this suspended 
by a ribbon of golden hue. 

During some of these days I get 
into whirlpools of thought and do not 
get out easily, though there begins to be 
revealed to me the meaning of, "from 
174 


Philip drunk to Philip sober.” Yet 
withal I shall not extricate myself 
without the sensation of having had my 
mental faculties drenched if not drowned. 

This experience is an easy one. 
Let the mind lie fallow for a day and 
then have it suddenly and delightfully 
inspired, the inspiration insuring every 
gradation from soberness to intoxication. 
In semi-intoxication it be^ loves to 
romance. The beginning may be with 
a formal mise-en-scene which, as in all 
romancing, soon gives way to that swell 
and swirl of feeling induced by thought. 
The day’s light mellows and the 
atmosphere is suffused with softness. 
The clouds of the sky grow light and 
fleecy, the miSs of the sea warm with 
perfume. There is wealth of Oriental 
splendour pervading this semi -sober 
romancing that keeps reaching back into 

175 


the deeper intoxication rather than 
forward into the soberer light. The 
morrow’s light will be sober in comparison 
because it can only know by hear-say of 
this morning’s Orient glow; its exaltations 
and satisfadions, its whole and complete 
degree of feeling, its no solitariness. In 
this fullness there is no craving, no 
reaching for human touch, no seeking to 
turn the channel of human sympathy on 
to the lands that are everywhere emerald 
in their green. 

From here— jud ■ over the great 
world’s border — it is both pleasant and 
easy to consider how all things could 
be got into rhythmic swing and then at 
the end of the swing come into a perfed, 
if a trembling poise. In the order of 
things there are four cardinal virtues 
belonging to the perfed charader, — 
prudence, judice, fortitude, temperance. 
176 


How easy then, how rhythmic the swing 
if prudence be allowed to guide will, if 
temperance be allowed to govern passion, 
and if fortitude and ju^ice be given the 
su^aining power. What a charming 
pidture these virtues thus employed make. 
Serenity and contentment being the 
possessions of the soul with charader in 
poise. They would become the 
possessions of the mind. 

Where is the exclamation, "Oh the 
depth of the human heart!" and the 
quedlon, "Who can sound it?" This 
heart of man seems to me far easier to 
underdand, to sound the depth of, than 
to even approximately come at an 
underdanding of the human mind. A 
man may take his heart into his hand, 
measure it, drop the plumb line of some 
great joy into its depths amd may so 
fix the line as to mark which way the 

177 


surface currents, and how far, are likely 
to carry it. He allows for some drift, 
which matters not, the plumb lying as 
it is safe at the deeps. But what 
Ccui he do with his mind? That illusive 
and elusive thing without which neither 
he nor his heart are of value, with 
which he and his soul need to grapple? 

On some one day he believes this 
mind of his to have come into poise, 
believes it has taken a firm hold of that 
sub -knowledge which is the beit 
possession of every man, and then 
some apprehension with no thread of 
truth in it comes rattling paSl and he 
relaxes his hold of the helm, lets go and 
begins a futile fight with waves that had 
had no power at all with his hand firm. 
^ ^ ^ ^ 

But, addio, addio, to all that. 
Truth in its sobriety gets too fa^l hold! 
178 


I love better the way an artist or poet 
delineates the truth,— their delicately 
suggestive ways, their gentle handling of 
the exquisite fabrics without danger of 
marring them. These gifted ones trace 
pidtures instead of sentences, cut soft 
lines in marble instead of inscribing 
hard ones on paper. If eyes see the 
same things, and minds think the same 
things it is then only the hand’s gift that 
differs? Buono! 


179 








”0 read the thoughts record- 
ed between the covers of 
some books, to turn page 
cmd page and all along the 
margins to write "Amen — 
These are my very own" — 
is to feel how close the kin- 
ship, how diredl the line of 
succession in the realm of 
Thought. 

The immortality of youth 
is nowhere else made such sure record 
of. The old and the new nowhere 
else so blended, so harmonized, made 
one in the bonds of the spirit. We talk 

181 


of the "spirit-of-the-age"— a thing be- 
longing to separate epochs of time, and 
it is transmitted to us within the covers 
of these books of youth immortal. In 
these are our own thoughts recorded 
even to the day’s detail. In one, to-day, 
I read my own record for to-day and 
have but to copy. 

Dated it is 1142, eleven hundred 
and forty two? To-day as then "The 
clock has Sopped. I sit here with no 
company but books. All minds in the 
world’s hiSory find their focus in a 
library. This is the pinnacle of the 
temple from which we may see all the 
kingdoms of the world and the glory of 
them. I keep Egypt and the Holy Land 
next the window. Beside them is 
Athens and the Empire of Rome. 

Never was such an army muSered 
as I have here. No general ever had 
182 


such soldiers. No kingdoms ever had 
half such illu^rious subjeds as mine, or 
half as well governed. 

I can put my haughtied subjeds up 
or down, as it pleases me. * * * 

I call "Plato" and he answers! A 
noble and durdy soldier he. " Aridotle " 
— a hod in himself — "Demodhenes," 
"Cicero," "Caesar," "Tacitus," "Pliny," 
— "Here!" they all answer and smile on 
me in their immortality — their youth; 
moded all, they never speak unless 
spoken to. Bountiful all, they never 
refuse to smswer. And they are all at 
peace together. My architeds are, 
without sound of hammer, building night 
and day; my painters designing, my 
poets singing, my philosophers discoursing, 
my hidorians and theologians weaving 
their tapedries, and my generals marching 
their troops without noise or blood dain. 

183 


I hold all Egypt in fee-simple. I 
build not a city but empires at a word. 

* * All the world is around me, 
all that ever stirred human hearts or 
fired the imagination is harmlessly here. 
My library shelves are the avenues of 
time. Ages have wrought, generations 
grown, and all their blossoms are ca^l 
down here. Here is the garden of 
immortal fruits, without dog or dragon." 

* * * * 

Yesterday it was the old Archbishop 
of Poidiers who wrote my day’s notes 
for me, to-day it is an older chronicler. — 
He says for me, "I go into my library, 
and like some great panorama, all 
hidory unrolls itself before me. I breathe 
the morning air of the world while the 
scent of Eden’s roses yet linger in it. 

* * * I see the Pyramids build- 

ing, I hear Memnon murmur as the fird 
184 


morning sun touches him. * * * 

I sit as in a theatre; the stage is time, 
the play is the play of the world. What 
a spedacle it is! What kingly pomp! 
What processions pass by ! What cities 
bum to heaven! What crowds of 
captives are dragged at the heels of 
conquerors! In my solitude I am only 
myself at intervals. The silences of the 
unpeopled Syrian plains, the incomings 
and outgoings of the Patriarchs,— 
Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac in 
the field at eventide; Rebecca at 
the well, — ^Jacob’s guile, Esau’s face 
reddened by desert suns, Joseph’s 
splendid funeral procession — all these 
things I find within the boards of my 
Old Testament. 

* * * » 

Books are the tme Elysian Fields 
where spirits converse,— couched on 

185 


flowers; and to these fields a mortal may 
venture unappalled. 

What king’s court can boail such 
company? What school of philosophy 
such wisdom? No man sees more 
company than I. I travel with mightier 
cohorts around me than did Tamerlane 
and Zenghi’s Kahn in their fiery marches. 

In my library I am a sovereign!" 
* * * * 

The familiar with the pure flow 
from classic springs cares little for the 
attenuated rivulets that, here and there, 
find their way out and about, and yet 
such do serve to irrigate soil that else 
might never show a blossom. But oh, 
fortunate familiar, what return make^t 
thou for these draughts from the classic 
spring? Return? There are no returns 
to make, there is only recognition! 
Sit at the edge of the spring and let your 
186 


heart be refleded from its pure deeps; 
walk along the soul’s heights and see 
how a man can be transfigured, and then 
take up the book again and see how on 
and on, simple and natural, and to the 
very truth the records run. 

* * * * 

"This paradisiacal domain lies ever 
open before our feet. These gardens 
rich with the opulence of heaven. You 
may breathe this pure and exhilarating 
atmosphere as you sit with those high 
souls whom God has illuminated with 
the flame of genius. Glorious leaders 
are waiting to welcome you, and gentle 
saints to sit as brethren at your side. 
Why need any man feel 'cabin’d,' 

' cribb’d, ' ' confined, ' in pettiness when 
at the lifting of a latch he may enter 
into 'unimaginable realms of faerie?' 

Why need we be drowned in 
187 


disappointment and li^tlessness, as with 
that tide on the coaSl of Lincolnshire, 
' always shallow, yet always deep enough 
to drown,' when * * he may as 

it were, hear Heaven’s Seraphim 
choiring round the sapphire throne? 
Can he not escape from those whom the 
poet calls, "Men slugs and human 
serpentry"; and can he not be relieved 
from life’s worit enemies, — relaxation, 
fretful and lawless passions, "spirits of 
waited energy and wandering desire, of 
unappeased famine and unsatisfied 
hope"— by communion with these kingly 
and radiant souls? A man who lives 
in this high society will walk through 
the world with the open eyes of wonder 
and the receptive mind of intelligence. 
He will believe in God; he will believe 
in man; he will believe in conscience; 
he will believe in duty; and while he 
188 


believes in these, no darkness without 
can ever wholly quench that light within 
which is a refledtion of the light of God 
himself in the human soul. 

The be^t books of man will throw 
more and more widely open before him 
the Books of God, which are be^t 
interpreted by that Chosen Literature of 
the Chosen People, which we specially 
describe as the Book of God." 

* * * * 

"The winds breathe softly on the violet 
bank. 

The thunder ^torm is heard afar on 
Lebanon, 

But felt not" 

here, where together with these 
immortals there is a chorus of younger 
voices; a pastoral hymn in sylvan rh3i:hm 
that gives a glimpse of color, a flutter 
of wings — 


189 


A honey bee’s kiss— and sweet hum — 
And what’s )nelded up to the smile 
of the sun? 

A butterfly kisses the lips of a rose 

And what’s yielded up in the 
fragrance that goes? 

A ^tar bends down from out of the blue 
The secret to tell to the likening 
few! 


190 


HERE, then, ends Italian Portraits in 
Engadine Frames written by Mrs. Lydia 
Ethel F. Painter, and made into this book 
by Mrs. Helen Bruneau Van Vechten 
at the Philosopher Press which is in 
Wausau Wisconsin at the Sign of the 
Green Pine Tree, and finished this 
2 1 ^t day of December mcmiv. 

^ One hundred copies printed from type 
and the type distributed. 






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